It Could Happen Here Weekly 235

Also media.

Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

It's bare time, yep, it's bad time. Hi everyone, welcome to take could Happen Here? A podcast where I talk to Molly Konga about animals.

Hi, Molly, I'm so excited to learn about bears.

I've been thinking about it all week.

That's atacta good You've had good bad thoughts, because there are people who think about beads a lot, and I think it's not good for the mental well being.

I was trying to find if I took a picture of that time a baby bear was like standing on the Median Strip outside my old apartment and I couldn't find it, so I was thinking about him.

Okay, Yeah, I hope he's okay. He's found a better place to be in the Median Strip. I bought a show and tell item today. Molly can see it. No one else can.

I was hoping he was going to be a live bear.

It's not a live bear. I don't I'm not allowed because of Woke. You can't have a pet grisly bear.

If you're about to tell me that those are bear antlers, I'm leaving.

Yeah, it's from These are actually original Jacalobe antlers from the California Jackalobe. Now it's a mule deer shared antler. I thought it was cool. I thought you'd like to see it.

It's beautiful.

Yeah.

I think lots of people don't realize that the antlers fall off and regenerate.

I feel like he's been a long time growing those.

Yeah he did, and then he just left them there as a gift for me in the wilderness. So I have a few of these.

He's not getting laid this spring.

Oh no, he's going to grow some more, ok and he's going to fight another dude with them in order to get laid.

So that fell off in a fight.

So he's just walking around with one. Oh he'd okay, he shed them.

Yeah that they shed them and regenerate them. Okay, like this is how. This is how they get bigger and more robust antlets each time. But they put a lot of a caloric energy into growing these.

That seems like that would really take a lot out of you.

Yeah.

Well, then they get horny and fight with other male deer for quite a while. Those antlers not horns, that's correct, but the horny is not related to them. Yeah, they go and then they yeah, they lose a lot of weight in that ratting time and then they have to gain it all back before the winter.

Just so focused on fighting and fuck, and they can't even eat.

Yep. It's the many such cases, many such cases. Yeah. Yeah, So I'm not talking about mule deer today and that they are cool. The first time I saw when I was like, I see why they call it a mule deer. Really got the ears going on. I want to talk about another type of charismatic North American megafauna, bears. So there are three species of bear in North America. Should have quiz, molly, you know what they are?

Okay, grizzly, brown, black.

Close that's for it's going to keep praying.

Bears.

Yeah, nominally they are, but I think, yeah, you didn't get them all during your period of guessing brown, black, and polar. Within brown bear, we have grizzly bears, brown bears, and Kodiak bears. We used to think that the California bears were a different species and not they just lived here.

They just have different politics.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. They we'd have been legalized, so they just sort of thing differently. The brown bears are what I want to talk about, So I'm going to use brown bear as like a blanket term for when they're on the coast in Alaska, they're called brown bears, right, and those are generally the biggest ones. And if you ever seen it, if you've been to Alaska, Molly no.

I would love to go to Alaska.

I've never been.

Yeah, Alaska fucking rips. I love Alaska.

I found out recently that black bears can be brown, and I just think we need I think we need to re evaluate the naming system.

It's not good, yes, because people, you know.

The advice about a brown bear versus a black bear is different. But if a black bear can be brown, and you're relying on a rhyming phrase to know what to do, you don't know what kind of bear that is.

Yeah, they call them cinnamon bears sometimes the brown black bears. Yeah, you can tell a grizzly bear the bigger they've got that more pronounced hump. They have a different shape to them.

No, you can tell. I cannot.

You'll fucking know that. Grizzly bears coming like they don't make themselves, you know, quiet, but yeah, the big hump, they've got a more pronounced hump. Grizzly bets can also really get into like a blonde coloration even.

Well yeah in California, sure everybody's blonde out there.

Yeah, they get frosted tips when they live by the coast for too long and they listen to sublime here. Yeah, let's talk about bears. I get my bear interactions by way of establishing some credibility. I want to point out that, like, interacting with bears doesn't make non expert I'm not an expert, And what we're going to talk about here is non experts interjecting their inexpert opinions about bears and why that's actually a problem.

I'm probably interacting with bears is not a desirable outcome for most listeners.

Yeah, I mean I love a bear like I see because I come from a place where there's very little that can kill you. Well, I mean there are things, right, there are cars, and we have cancer in the UK as well, of course, but like animal wise, you're more or less nuclear.

Right.

We have adders, which is a type of snake and they are venomous. But like, I can't think the last time I ever heard of someone getting killed, but I'm sure someone has been killed by an adobyte, but it's very rare.

Now you don't have when you have a lion on like a flag or something, somebody has one.

But I have a few lions. We've got some flag lions. Yeah, you know the lines, the lines In fact, we I love the lines on a flag because they're drawn by someone who's never seen a lion. But just like a game of telephone has resulted.

Anybody he knows they're very majestical.

Yeah, it's majestic, kind of like a dog longer hair. I think there was the input before he drew the lines. I kind of like being on the landscape with animals that are bigger than me and like they are the apex predator. The first time I saw Grizzly Bear, I had a bush planed to a lake in the Wrangle sent Elias Wilderness. It's in Alaska, Southeast Alaska, massive wilderness area, and we were gonna hike around a bit and then

That's cute as hell. I would love to see that. I would love to see some baby bears.

Yeah, it's sick. I'd best to stay away from them. That's when they can get angry.

I would like to see them from like over here, yeah, and then they can be over there, like maybe on the other side.

Of a river.

Yeah, I get well, the bears, there's none afraid of water, but yeah, that's they do love to eat salmon. Yeah, it was sick. That was a sick trip. Generally, we've got to see the glacier carving, so like that's when a little baby glacier is born. Right, But the glacier a section of it broke off, and I'm talking a section of size of like a city block here.

Why but it's so shiny when it breaks.

Yeah, it's shiny and it's allowed. It's like an earth shattering rumble.

Right.

And then this thing was it was majestic, right, Like it looks like a mountain has fallen into the water and that was cool as fig and then you realize that, like it has displaced a mountain sized amount of water.

Mood.

Yeah, and now there are like fridge sized ice blocks coming at head height towards you. So yeah, we did some fast uphill running in that moment. But it was a last So it was summertimes. It wasn't getting dark, right, you have like twenty four hours sunlight, so at least it wasn't dark when that happened.

Only time to run from the glacier.

Yeah, great time to run from the glacier. I wouldn't want to do it in the wintertime. I don't think they carve in the winter time. Maybe they still do. I think it's to do with temperature rising. So that was my I've seen a lot of black bears. I'm a San Diego black bear truther. But it's another fun thing about me. For some reason, people don't think there are black bears in San Diego, and that is not true. I have seen barefootprints, people have seen bears on game cameras.

It's like the ongoing feud about whether or not we have panthers on the East coast.

Oh yeah, you guys love to It's like a Carolina panther or something.

People are very sure I have no skin in this game.

Yeah, I think that's a breeding family of mountain lions now maybe in Michigan. So they're getting closer, they're getting They're coming your way as you soon will. I've seen a lot of bears, or a good number of bears. Seen a lot of black bears right, we have them in California. The fact that I've seen bears does not make me a bear expert. And another non bear expert has been diving into the discourse on bears after.

A tragedy like genuinely a terrible.

Thing, when a hiker lost their life in Glassier, we'll try and to say the American way Glacier National Park.

We're going to get messages about this, this British word.

Yeah right, it's not like a buffalo issue. I'm just straight colonizing it. I'm sure it had an indigenous name, and so so are you if you're saying Glacier. This is really sad, right. A hiker from Florida was more by a bear, Andyde very shortly in relation to that, serious injuries occurred in another morning in Yellowstone National Park.

He's not the one from Real World road Rules, right, so that's the transportation guy.

I don't think so. If he is, I'm not aware of what Real World road Rules is.

I'm just having drouble remembering which members of cabinet have been on reality TV, and I don't think this is one of them.

Okay, sorry, no, not to my knowledge. Zinky, he was maybe seal officer. He's now representative from Montana. He was Interior secretary in Trump's first administration. He presided over a series of attacks on public lands, so that we saw in Trump one point over.

Exactly what you want to see from your secretary of the Interior.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's trying to rebrand himself as some kind of protector of public lands. Now he's kind of too late. On that one in my opinion, but he's certainly on the protector of bears. Last week he tweeted, maybe he's zeated and we're not doing that. We're gonna okay dead naming it. Last week, two grizzly bear attacks claimed the life of a hiker in Glacia National Park and seriously

Eye for an eye for Florida man.

Yeah.

I was speaking to a bear a scientist who studies human bear interactions this week, and he referred to these as revenge killings. Yeah, because they won't just kill. They often in many instances don't know which bear. Sometimes we can we can that we can know the size of the bear right from like the size of the jaws that we can have several bears. There are different sizes of jews. Seems a distance between the different teeth stuff like this.

Right, right, Like if one bear is like if it's like a jaw situation, like one bear just has it out for hikers.

Sure, I guess go get him.

But that's not like it's not happening. Yeah, and they will end up killing a number of bears in an area when this stuff happens, right, which is it's just a revenge killing. So we're taking out like we're taking out our anger on that species because they came after our species.

It seems like the problem is not that there's too many bears.

That is correct, Molly, That is that is why we're here today.

He seems to be positioning this as there's just too many bears. People just can't avoid the bears because there's so many bears.

Then it's not the case. Millions of people every year visit the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and very few of them see a bear, right.

And even few of them touch a bear.

Yeah, you're touching a grizzly bear. It's a bad day, viet Let's I guess it has decided it wants to be touched.

I don't want a victim blame obviously, Like these are wild animals that are unpredictable.

You're in their home. What does guy do? Why was he so close to the bear?

We don't know exactly what this I did. There are a number of bear safety things which I do want to talk about, And I spoke to Tom Smith last week and I'm going to turn that into another podcast, but like, this is the person who is the guy who writes the studies on human interactions with bears right and specifically on how those could be like de escalated.

I'm not blaming the victim, Like if you don't know, you don't know, you're inexperienced outdoorsman or whatever.

But I feel like.

There's a series of just like pieces of advice and if you follow them, you're not going to get in that situation most of the time.

Mostly most of the time. Yeah, I think if I was going into bear country, I wouldn't take a dog. A lot of people take dogs. Dog is a great way to find a bear. You're looking for a bear, you could go send out your dog, and it'll come back to you with a bear and toe some like hunting dogs and also tree bears. But that's not what I'm talking about.

It because the bear sees the dog as a delicious snack.

I think the dog sees as a bear as a threat, right, and I'll stop back and they'll get and then like the bear then obviously sees a dog as what the fuck is this little animal? A begs predator here? Yeah, Like we're locked in, and the dog can smell the bear, right, so it's going to find it, and the be can smell the dog, so they're going to find each other.

I guess I was thinking of my dog, which a bear would definitely see is a delicious snack.

Yeah, your dog, I could see. Maybe it'd be sub snack sized, it wouldn't be worth it, but.

Like a little cocktail weenie.

Yeah, a sausage dog would try it, it wouldn't give it, like I've seen. I've sent you a video of a sausage dog, Yeah, chase chasing off a mountain lion like they didn't give a fuck. Very brave.

So yeah, don't take a dog, don't try and pet it.

Yeah, don't take a dog, don't try and pet it. In this instance, I think the person was moving through thick country where the bear was probably foraging for berries, and they probably startled the bear, as you don't want to start the bet If you're moving through thick country like that, that's when people will say hey bear, or they'll use a bear bell, or they'll talk loud and converse with people in their group. It is generally preferred to be in a group when we're in grizzly country, right,

Yes, contextualize the bear.

Yeah, rensink he wants to delist the bear from the Endangered Species Act. Right, bears haven't always been protected by the Dangered Species Act. That's why California has a bear on its flag that doesn't live here anymore.

Oh, we don't have those anymore.

No, we kill them ball. We don't have brown bears here.

So is he on the flag? Because you're sorry? About it because you're proud of it.

No, I think it's more of a pride thing. I think it's more of a ye, we got him, fucking yeah. Yeah, I don't actually know what he's on the flag. I'll do some searching. I'm pretty sure it's not because we're sorry about it. We have a good source right of what European people did when they first encounter bears. It's not my story from Alaska.

Oh.

I thought they did not know about them.

Well they did, because, as it turns out, as Lewis and Clark were moving across the plains right, they encountered indigenous people who very specifically told them not to fuck with bears. Let me quote from Lewis's diary.

I thought you would not have to tell like if I have never I had no concept of bear, and I see a bear, my instinct is going to be I'm going to leave that guy alone.

See Yeah, but these guys are just built different. As it turns out, they're bear poking and no desire is extremely turns out counterproductive for them. Let's read from the Lewis and Clark diary. Is a first on the podcast. Quote the Indians give a very formidable account of the strength and ferocity of this animal, which they never dare to attack, but in parties of six, eight or ten persons, and are even then frequently defeated with a loss of

Zeb I was gonna say, is he talking about polar bears, because you definitely don't do that.

Yeah, yeah, I do not fuck with it. Bare polar bear will end you. That was on the fifteenth of April.

So he's like, yeah, it takes eight or ten guys, usually one of them dies.

They don't always succeed.

I'm gonna go check it out.

I got it.

Yeah, yep. So by early May, Captain Clark and Dryer killed the largest brown bear this evening which we have ever yet seen. It was a most tremendous looking animal and extremely hard to kill. Notwithstanding he had five balls through his lungs and five others in various parts. He swam more than half the distance across the river to a sandbar, and it was at least twenty minutes before he died. Then they go and say they thought it weighed about five hundred pounds, but they didn't have any

Oh my god.

Yeah, so enraged was this animal that he plunged into the river only a few feet behind the second man he had compelled to take refuge in the water. When one of those he still remained on the shore shot him through the head and finally killed him.

That's not fair. They should have let him have that guy.

Yeah's eye for an eye, Like it's fascinating to me, right that, like you do see this sometimes in like indigenous people's records. Right, there was I forget his name, I forgot I was reading about this one Indigenous American guy who was like, every time I see a bear,

Found the murder monster.

Yeah, it tells me so much about the American psyche, right that the Indigenous people were like, you know, they they will kill you.

And like how much bear meat were they eating?

Yeah, I mean it may be a bit. I don't know, like you can eat bare meats kind of greasy from what I understand.

So they're just going after bears just because it's fun.

I do understand that Lewis and Clark had to collect and catalog animals, which obviously they didn't bring them back alive. Right, they brought back skulls and hides and that kind of thing, so that the Western way of understanding the world could catalog and understand these animals. And there is a great deal of knowledge that that way of seeing the world gain from that expedition. But they also mixed it up with a lot of bears. You can read more examples

I don't need to prove anything to a bear.

Yeah, I'm at peace. I'm happy to coexist with bears. I'm happy that they're there, They're happy that I'm here. I hope we can have a nice time. I don't want to fight with bears. Lewis and Clark, by the way, I find that Lewis and clark Is vision fascinating. Like at the time they were crossing the plains, they were meeting with indigenous people who had been to Paris to check it out and come home.

I have no concept of that.

Right. We see them as like questing into the great unknown, and these people are like, yeah, no, I went over, but those.

People have, they've been out back.

Yeah.

Yeah, they just didn't want it right. They came back because they liked it. They were having they were fine. It wasn't that they hadn't been exposed to the European world. It was just that the European world had not physically expanded to attempt to colonize the places that they lived. Certainly, this idea that they going on.

It really makes what they did a lot less impressive.

Yeah.

I mean it was a long journey, sure.

I mean people hug the Abaloche of Trail every year. I'm not impressed.

That does go a perpendiculative.

I'm just saying people walk a thousand miles all the time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They did a lot of canoeing. It's a weird hobby Lewis and Clark. It's just a fun hobby. I like walking. But yeah, I mean it's an impressive journey. But like I think sometimes we have this idea of them like questing into the unknown, and that's just not it. That have met people who have been like oh yeah, I've been there, Like, what do you think of Paris. Sadly, the Lewis and Clark expedition was not the low point

So is this largely habitat encroachment or over hunting or I mean, obviously.

Both all of the above.

Like, so we were just going out there and shooting them, just the bounties.

There were bounties for men by the millions. Yeah, they were paying people to shoot the bears.

We've got a buffalo situation.

Yeah, yeah, we got a buffalo situation here.

So this wasn't just like people doing hobby hunting and like concurrent habitat encroachment. This was like an intentional destruction of bear.

The bear doesn't coexist well with like the human habitation and specifically like animal.

Agriculture, right, like it is that's not a great name.

Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't give a fuck, and it's a big animal and it will tear shit down and people are scared of it. Bears used to live all across the plains, right, It was only a small segment of the bears that in the mountains. They're the ones that survived, just because those are the areas that it was harder to make amenable to capitalism.

That never occurred to me. Yeah, that never occurred to me. That they have retreated from the hills to get away from us.

Yeah, I don't think it's that the Plains bears went to the hills. I think it's that the Plains bears are gone.

Right, They're just the ones that survived because they were like that's crazy.

The bears just used to be roaming around down here.

Yeah, the bears would be out and about. Actually, the eastern most grizzly bear sow with cubs that I'm aware of is on the APR, like in the Missouri River breaks that's in the American Prairie Reserve. People who didn't listen to a Buffalo episode callback, Yeah, that's what's what

I always think of what was it somebody who's colonizing and farming in Hawaii brought mongoose because they thought the mongoose would eat some They thought the mongoose would eat something that was causing a problem for the crops.

It turns out the mongoose don't even eat that so now, but like feral mongie.

Sometimes, like around sunset at the beach, you'll see all these like mongoose just like coming out of the underbrush taking over the beach.

Okay, that's amazing.

Because like they have no natural predators there.

Yeah, right, like yeah, introducing animals into ecosystems and removing animals from ecosystems has all these downstream effects that like we never think, like I am to Sophie about this today. Like I grew up in the UK, right, where we have tons of rabbits.

Oh, she has a rabbit in the garden today, does she show you?

Mm hmm, yeah, yeah, I've seen a rabbit. Yeah, it's able to identify it. The rabbit population is high in part because we've removed many of their predators. Right, the wolves are gone in the UK, The bears are gone in the UK. We have some foxes, but not as many because they are dangerous to sheep populations.

Right.

We have some raptors, but not as many. So now we have times to rabbits. When the rabbits do well, they eat crops in part, right, and they come in and eat your carrots as depicted in the Peter rabbit.

Oh, a Peter rabbit is just tearing the garden apart every day. Mister McGregor was right.

It's a bold statement. Molly Konga childhood villain. Now, the rabbits have a disease called mix and mitosis, which is horrific disease where like they sort of become almost like zombified. Yeah, I think it. It came from Australia.

They've got a rabbit problem.

Well, they were trying to eradicate them, right, so.

Also they invented a rabbit disease.

I don't know this is what now I'm wondering if they invented the rabbit disease.

Lit's because they did that to another invasive animal.

Right, Well, they lost a war.

They gave them all a disease.

I'm not even then they lose a war against emuse, that's right. The Australians really have a bad record.

Yeah.

So basically it is a disease that existed in American rabbits only causes mild issues with them, but it is horrific in European rabbits.

Yeah, it looks like they did it on purpose. Yep, you know creat up guys.

Yeah, mixmatosis and rabbits, like is a thing that like genuinely as a kid would like, So I used to shoot a lot of rabbits when I was a kid, Right, and you shoot these rabbits with mixed motosis and be like what the fuck is this? Like how have we done this to a living creature? They become so incapacitated that like sometimes crows will start eating them before they've died, or like they wander onto the road and get hit. Right, it's really really really horrible.

Oh I'm looking this up and I regret.

Yeah, no, yeah, Google makes motosis pictures at your own risk.

No, don't, actually don't.

Yeah.

It almost looks like they have like cataracts over their their eyes. It's it's really really horrible, right, But like, this is what happens when we continually try and mess with an ecosystem that has existed in harmony, and like it changes based on inputs and changes in the climate. Right, Like, it's not like it's a fixed thing. It has shifted and changed through time, but it has found a balance every time. And then we come in and just keep pressing one side of the scale.

This will fix it.

Yeah, more, but keep chucking more on there and wondering.

Kill the bears back.

I just I can't get that's just like a child's approach to things.

This is our policy, right, Like, okay, so let's talk about Zincy, right, let's talk about let's talk about the protections that he wants to take away. These protections were passed into law by the Endangered Species Act in nineteen seventy three, and the Endangered Species Act lists grizzly bears and the lower forty eight as threatened. If you're not familiar with the essay, it prevents you from hunting, harming, or harassing lifted species without a special permit.

Maybe he thought he's supposed to threaten them.

Yeah, yeah, like harass them, Like maybe it's going to do it threatened yea, these.

Are threatening, of course we should threaten.

Yeah, he was going to post a mean tweet about them. They didn't want to be accused of harassing them and violating the essay. One thing the ESA does not do is prevent you from defending yourself against these bears, which it seems to be the implication in his post, right that like, because you're in you're.

Allowed to defend yourself against a person, so I'm sure.

It's likewise a bet. There was a Night's case not so long ago about someone who had killed three grizzly bears.

So if you get arrested for killing an endangered animal, is it like a murder trial where you have to like prove self defense?

I think it would depend on where you did it, right. I was standing my ground your Yeah, sure I was. I don't even want to make jokes about standiy Grand Miles, because fucking horrible. The nine second opinion says we hold the good faith belief defense for a prosecution and then

That's interesting that the language, because you don't see that, and so in self defense in like if I harmed you and an actual No, it doesn't have to be actual, but it has to be a reasonable assumption, like my belief has to be reasonable. But in Listen, there's saying it's okay if your belief was unreasonable. Yeah, if you're just scared dumb as well.

Yeah, yeah, if you if you have no idea what you're doing, you can still kill these bears, right, Like, it gives you a very broad remit for self defense.

Because you could just say you felt that way, because it doesn't matter if that's reasonable or not.

Yeah, so it effectively doesn't matter.

Yeah, effectively if you if you are willing to state in court that you were threatened by the bear, I felt that way, right, it seems like you can you can shoot the bear. I almost just scared. I'm as scaredy cat. Maybe it relies on toxic masculinity to like self self police itself and it's scared.

No.

It also, of course, the say does not include animals based on how dangerous they are. So like Xinki's argument that we should deal with bears because two people got hurt one person got killed, it doesn't line up with why the essay exists.

And like I'm very sorry for those people, of course, but like that's not like an epidemic of bear attacks.

No, cattle kill more people by a factor of ten than bears.

Dogs kill more people with guns.

Yeah, lightning kills more people than bears.

Dog shot a lady with a gun the other day.

Oh wow, Well, good for him, like it's good to see people pushing boundaries. I like, bad for her. I guess I'm sorry to hear that, but I do think there are some best practices that could have been followed there that I prevented the dog shooting.

The dog was certainly not certified on the range, right.

Yeah, the dog hadn't gone taken his apple seed clinic or whatever. So the ESA, right, it distinguishes between a threatened and engaged species and danger species is quote in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant part of its range. A threatened species is quote likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.

Right, Like if we start killing them.

Yeah, or keep killing them, yeah.

Right, Ryan, Zincy just opens up on bears.

Yeah, yeah, Zincy taking his Navy steel training and going the.

Sealed Teams six is going to Yellowstone.

Yeah yeah, they're going after that bear. Then you know, then then they look at reasons for this great disease, predation, destruction of habitat, commercial take, inadequacy of regulatory mechanisms to protect them, or natural or man made factors, including brand Zincy killing them because grizzly bears in the lower forty eight are threatened. There are defined ecosystems. There are six of them in which we're trying to recover the their population.

I feel like, if you're on the cusp like that, leave it alone.

Like obviously if every time you dealist them they become threatened again, like, leave them alone.

Yeah, that's it. Well, in this case, it wasn't. The reason for the delisting was challenged in court and found to be insufficient. It wasn't that a population like to could dive.

We're just changing our mind about how much we care about bears.

Yeah, or like in this case, basically what the court said, I can actually read you from the court order. It's crow Indian try their al versus USA. The policy implications of Great Yellowstone Grizzly delisting are significant, but they cannot affect the court's disposition. Althose order may have impacts throughout grisly country beyond. This case is not about the ethics of hunting. It's not about solving human or livestock grisly conflicts.

So the Bear has got a good lawyer.

There were two different court cases and they were combined in this Montana case. Then they got a good lawyer. Essentially that what they're saying though, right, is that like this is an issue which we have to look at like nationally, because if we have state controller and Wyoming or Montana of the three states, right, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. One of them says that we've got too many bears killing too many cows. That so open it up on

They simply do not respect borders.

They do not they Yeah, they refuse.

To graistictional boundaries meaningless.

To they engage in interstate commerce. So this one, it's going to be like a federally controlled issue. Unfortunately, our federal government right now is not one that's massively amenable to conservation.

It's run by bear murderers.

Yeah, they would love to mert. I mean Donald Trump's son, right is big into Oh.

He does love big game hunting, doesn't he does? He does some of those like rich boys afar.

Yeah, he's got It's funny.

Someone was like, oh, someone was talking to me the other day about like you should picture this outdoor publication, and then I realized it was owned by Trump Junior. So that's a no from me. That's a clear note

Or like the same species of bears. They just live somewhere else.

Arctos horribilis. Yeah, the same horibles. Yeah, yeah, they really are for him. Yeah, they really screwed him on the name. This is part of the way the colonial mindset interacts with nature, right, horrible mister horrible Yeah, horrible bear. That's me, Like I'm aware of like Arctos Syriacus, which is the Syrian there, fine, except that makes sense, that's descriptive. He also lives in other parts of the region. But that's okay. Yeah, yeah,

Call it those lawyers from Montana.

I get the coalition together again with the crow tribe, the bear. It's not inherently horrible, right, We've just been horrible to the bear. He's just doing what he does.

Maybe that's why he's so bad.

Maybe, right, He's like, you know, if you're gonna call me horrible, I'll be horrible.

Yeah, maybe maybe, maybe he's he's playing to the stereotype. So the Alaska bears can be hunted, right, they are hunted. Things do get a little complicated in Alaska with different rules gaverning sport hunting and subsistence hunting at federal land and state land. There is a coal program in Alaska right now that is understandably very controversial. The idea is that they will cull the bear to help the caribou population recover. You are looking at a thing which is

Like, because other things go on for the cariboo.

Yeah, yeah, it's not the bear who moved into the cariboo's home. It is people, right like. And it's not the bear who caused climate change.

Right like.

There are other factors we could address, but we're taking it out on the bear.

Yeah, which will be a common theme throughout our discussion here today. But I understand that we want the caribou herd to survive as well. But if you're trying to manage the caribou herd for hunting by controlling bear populations to allow more caribou. I know, I don't think.

That's we're modifying the wrong varia.

Yes, pretty gate. Yeah, there is Alaska legislation that I thought was interesting to make such programs go through peer review that appears to be going absolutely nowhere. It seems stuck in the Alaska House.

So we had to get a bunch of scientists to determine whether or not there will be environmental impact of buffalo going back to where buffalo live, But we can't get a scientific review of whether or not we should be killing the bears.

Yes, I know that there are other reasons for us to do environmental impact studies like hydrology and stuff. Thank you Eis people who reached out. We appreciate all our science listeners. But yeah, it is pretty sad that we can't get up get a I guess the argument would be per review takes too long, okay, but like you could get a couple of people to be like, you know what, it takes a lot longer to get all the bears back. Get a couple of scientists. It wouldn't

So let's talk.

About I guess like wy Zincy wants to delist.

Them a Bearstol's wife and.

Like an eating way they live to Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's she's living her best life. It seems that one incident was a sow with cubs who was foraging for berries, and on the other one was a bear foraging for berries who was surprised. This is nothing to us a population levels.

As I said earlier, it's just like it's an unfortunate thing where somebody was in a bad situation.

Yeah, it's we live in a landscape where things can kill you. Most of those things are cars, but some of them are animals.

Well, we should start shooting the cars.

Yeah, but we don't do a revenge attack on foard every time someone gets in a motor accident. Right. I looked at bear vault to beare volt. If you're not familiar, money makes bear cans. You're familiar with bear cans.

So it like tin cans you wear around your next to you jingle jangle.

Yes, yes, you can talk to the bear.

He holds one, can you hold the other one?

There's a stroke like he's in history house here in your tree house exactly.

Yeah, you say, I'm coming through you, please don't eat me.

No.

A bear can is a thing that you put your food in when you're camping.

I was picturing like a big necklace made out of like old tin cans, like.

An old timey a like a ley, but for cans beans.

Yeah, I don't know why you You wouldn't need to buy that.

You could make that at home.

Yeah, you can make that for free. Bere Vault keeps like an open source collection of bear maulings. Bears, according to their data, have killed sixty six people since nineteen seventy four.

That's not very many.

It's not a lot of people, right.

One a year, Yeah, a little more than that.

It's very, very hard to make a public health argument for dlifting brown bears.

More people, more people than not have measles, like in my immediate area.

Get well, that's a whole other public health issue. I'm afraid when they do ESA studies on what kills bears, it's human interactions. I noticed a lot of bears, probably guns mostly trains. Trains kill a lot of bears.

That's so sad.

Yeah, it's really sad.

So maybe wait, so you're supposed to make noise of the bear. Here's you comment. Trains are loud as hell.

They come pretty fast, I think, and I think that they're not like super loud if you're just like if they're not trying to be loud, you know, like if if you're in a linear direction to the train, maybe they're habituated to it because the trains come so regularly. I don't know, that's so sad.

Yeah, I never thought about bear getting hit by a train.

Yeah, it's good. Bears get hit by cars too, especially black bears. I mean, I'm sure brown bears do. They're just bigger. I wonder if that's part of why, you know, like there's a sort of we can't afford to keep smashing our trains on bears situation here. I'm not sure.

I think the train's probably fine, Yeah, I mean the train going.

Some of those bears are pretty big. I'm sure it delays their train operations.

I mean, if there was like a massive train derailment, yeah, that's maybe we need to build a bear fence or something.

I don't know.

Yeah, well, we have these wildlife under passes right that allow worldlife to go under or over three ways. While ago the right was getting really mad about one in Santa Monica. This was like a I think Benny Johnson had done like an investigation into this overpass. His theory here was that the overpass was allowing I'm not joking, terrible cougars to come into neighborhoods and kill people's children. We came into the cougar's neighborhood, the cougar's, Benny, are already fucking there because.

And how many children have been eaten by cougars in Santa Monica.

I'm aware of one person in California being killed by a mountain line in the last few years, and a few more people have been killed, and you can think of a couple more people.

But mostly on like hiking trails, right, Like it's not their yards.

Yes, I'm not aware of it. Cougar coming into anybody's house. That's not really how the mountain lion lives its life.

I mean sometimes people's Chihuahuas have lost their lives to this scourge.

I understand, yeah, yeah, but not their children.

Not their children, And like animals aren't coming to your house and taking your child, and the idea that they're not there anyway, like they if they want to come into your neighborhood. They can come into your neighborhood. They're good at moving across country, that's what they do.

This will just keep you from running into it with your lexus.

Yeah, exactly like it. And it's going to allow like the little mice and other small creatures, right that can't some nim belief jump over highway barriers. The obvious other argument for delisting bears is that.

People want to kill them.

Get a different hobby.

You can even kill black bears in most states in the Western United States if that's your thing. Right, It seems like a lot of people just don't want bears around, and that makes me sad because I think sharing our landscape with bears is beautiful and they think it's special that we have this thing in this country, Like it's one of our national symbolic mammals, right.

I mean he's like a gigantic guy who just wants to eat berries and hang out.

Yeah, he wants to kill stuff, sure, But.

Like just I love the idea of just like this huge animal just like roaming around looking for a little.

Sweet treat Yep.

Yeah, they they they're incresis precious, They're incredibly adaptable, right, they can eat berries, they can eat meat, they can eat fish.

I love when they just take one bite of a fish and throw it back so wasteful.

He's just like me, for real, it's too fishy. He wants it, yeah, he wants it like a fresh one. The other argument, I guess is a certain population to recovered, which kind of it shows a misunderstanding the importance of having a population for genetic diversity, right, But also like.

I just I'm really stuck on like, just because there's a lot of them doesn't mean you have to kill There's a lot of squirrels in my neighborhood, but I'm not allowed to shoot them.

And you can't just do a squirrel genocide.

I think, oh, there's just a lot of these, I'm going to do violence on them.

Just yeah, I don't do that. There are a lot of these, and it's been incoming convenient for us, and therefore it's interesting to look at like the certain population sort of doing well. At the Yellowstone Bears. The Yellowstone Bets are much higher meat content in their diet than they used to.

Well, the tourists the reading, Yes.

That's right, Yeah, that's mostly it. They feed them into the moor every year they drop off a bus at the bear cave as an offering, and then the bears violated the treaty. That's why they're mad. No, it's because climate changes is making it hard for them to find their berries right, and human pressure is pushing them further

And honestly, it's so harmful for the bears that they've all been listening to Jordan Peterson.

The cardboard diet is not for everybody.

Just imagining a bear.

It's not good advice, you guys.

Yeah. Yeah, They've become like terrible transfhobs. That's really why we want to tea list them. I think we can look at what happens when animals lose their protections. We can see the way that Wyoming, for instance, dealt with wolves.

Right.

Are you familiar with this incident last year of that wolf that was like horrifically mistreated in Wyoming. Oh that was really fucking gross.

Did they like torture it?

Yes?

Why?

Because I guess it made them feel big and strong.

Right.

So again, this isn't about like managing conflict with livestock. It's not about like you know, ecological management, it's not. This is about people who just want to hurt animals. Yeah, because they didn't just kill this wolf because they didn't want it around.

They did look horrible to it.

Yeah, I mean this guy. There are videos of this, right that this guy.

So they tormented in an animal and then they made a video of it. They made like an animal snuff film. This is just about torture.

I'm not saying everyone who wants to dealist Disney Breads grispy bears wants to torture them in this way.

But like this, like this desire to engage in this violence.

Yeah, like for certain people, right, there's an idea somehow that they can prove like strength and virility and masculinity.

Get into powerlifting.

Yeah. So what this guy did the people un familiar His name is Cody Roberts.

Who never met a good Cody.

I've met some nice coadies.

Oh no, okay, we know what.

Yeah, he hit the wolf on his he ran down the wolf on its snowmobile.

So it wasn't bothering you. You pursued it.

Yeah, he chased on his snowmobile. He taped its mouth shut and took it to a bar.

Does this man has a wife? Have a wife and a she?

Okay, that's a good question. I'm trying to work out if he went to jail eighteen months formation cremation, uh, and he gets a prison term if he fails. He fathered guilty plea to fellony animal cruelty. I understand that there are people like within the hunting ranching outdoor space who think this guy's a piece of shit. There are many of them, I know many of them.

Because that's a very weird thing to do. Like, yeah, it's psycho, it's no good thought process. What is shooting it? I don't agree with, but I understand that you would do that. That's the thing people do. But why did you like chase it down and abduct it?

Yeah? Why did you choose to make this animal suffer?

Like?

Like did you just show no respect for life?

Right?

Like you we joke like, oh, does you have a way of She's okay, but genuinely, this is a person who is like a psycho, Like.

No, I'm not joking. I'm not joking.

Actually, Like, if you if this is your first instinct for how you treat a living creature, like.

I bet he's not good to women either.

Yeah, Like, this doesn't seem like a person who people should feel safe around.

Oh it was a young female wolf too.

Yeah.

Oh no, what have you found?

Sorry?

I just was I found a picture of her.

Yeah. No, it's really sad. The whole thing is really sad. Like to injure this animal right to the to the extent that it can't get away or defend itself, and then tape up its mouth and then drag it to a place where it's going to be in fear for the rest of its life before you kill it. It's it's unconscionable. It's horrific. I'm not saying that that will happen to bears, but I'm saying that.

Like a bear would be a lot harder to do that too.

Yeah, I would be, you know, I think I think as his punishment, this guy should try to do this to a bear.

What I am saying is that even if we like go ahead and dealist bears without serious controls, if we start to manage them just as like vermin, right, like as a pest like this opens up all kinds of avenues, and I think.

A lot of people will find themselves in a situation that is beyond their grasp.

Yeah, right, Like if if suddenly you are if you're a guy who's like, yeah, i'd love to shoot a bear, now you're allowed to.

I think people are going to find themselves in situations they didn't anticipate.

Yeah, I know in Alaska, for instance, if you want to hunt a brown bear and you're not a NASCAR resident, you have to go with a guide. That's probably a good thing.

Right, Like I think if we start killing the bears back, more people will get killed, but bears, a lot of these guys are gonna die.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the bad deaths will go up, without a doubt. Yeah yeah, Ready, your your best chance of getting into an encounter with a bear is probably hunting, right, Like, if you're not not hunting bears necessarily, but let's say you're Yeah, because you're moving around the woods quietly, you could start the one.

Right, So that's already against the advice for not encountering.

And then if you then you're able to shoot something, and then you Let's say you're in your backcountry hunting, right, you have to backpack them.

Now you have met me out.

Yeah so, but then now you're coming back to the carcass for your second load of meat. A bear may have found that carcass.

Right, somebody might already be there.

He might not want to give that up. It's his now, Yeah that you Yeah, you're then find yourself in a difficult situation. Talking with difficult situations, Molly, I have to pivot to advertisements again. Yeah, hopefully this one's not for a wolf tape. We are back. Let's talk Molly about safety in bear country, grisly country, specifically right after this this tragedy where this hiker died in Glassian National Park.

Well, I think if you think it's a placebo, you should taste it.

Yeah, it's It shows a fundamental misunderstanding ifs not only how bear spray works, but also what a placebo is. Right, Like you three of the words in your title, all of the nouns you don't understand.

The bear doesn't know what it is.

The placebo effect will not work.

On bear Yeah right, yeah, exactly, get right. Yeah, well, the Placibo effect actually does work on bears. You can spray things that are not bear spray and they still.

Don't like the bear spray before.

Yeah, it's just the I guess maybe the Perceibo effect. Yeah, it's a noise. It's the cloud, like I guess it's not really a place.

Bewildering because it's it's startling.

Yes, yeah, yeah, but you're not saying it's actually.

The bear will not have sort of imaginary symptoms of bear spray exposure due to their beliefs.

Yeah, yeah, that they have been bear spray. I should note that most of the articles are written by the same person.

So what's his motivation here?

Why is it he's like, does he own a company that sells something that like rivals big bear spray.

No, it's a person who's got a guy called west Saila who used to write for Outside magazine and no longer does. There's a escalating trend in the severity of his claims about the lack of efficacy of bear spray that correlates with him making income that is directly related to the number of views on the articles making those claims.

That is really destroying the information landscape.

Yeah, I mean I think also people not knowing what the fuck they're talking about and being given a platform is also destroying the information landscape. Right, but they both of those are in play here.

Really see the sort of escalating way people write because their income is dependent on clickbase.

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah that the clicks to cash pipeline is not helping us.

I make the same amount of money even if none of you listen to my podcast.

Yeah, you guys, you could all turn this off right now, I'd still be poor. This is not true, right, I take really strong offense at this. I don't know the qudit wait to say this is bullshit? Right?

Like if Bear Spain never worked and couldn't work, he wouldn't be the only one saying it correct. There be there will be scores of people saying I tried this and nothing happened.

Yeah.

Also, like we have data on this, right. This is not a thing that we need to pull out of our ass. This is not a thing that we need to rely on individual anecdotes for. This is not a thing that will be determined by the outcome of a single incident in Glacier National Park.

This is a thing that we have masses of data on.

There's bear scientists.

I spoke to one, Molly.

I can't wait to hear that.

I had a very lovely conversation. He has the two studies, and to be clear, where sit sees and I don't know if it's just that he didn't read them, or he didn't read them well, or that he read them to the best of his ability. And this is what we're getting.

I mean, scientific literacy is pretty poor.

Sure, it's always okay not to write an article making claims about something that impacts people's safety if you don't know what you're talking about. It's always okay to be quiet when we're discussing the people's well being. That's fine.

Adults talk about it.

Doesn't impact your substack in the same way.

But oh, it's a substack situation.

Yeah, it's a subsect situation. I would suggest that writing that best bray is dangerous or useless is akin to saying that seat belts are dangerous or useless, and that we can, if we look hard enough, find one person who was killed by their seat belt, and no one's ever been killed by best braidedge. I have been best braid more than once.

Didn't kill me when when we were talking about this earlier, this most shocking fact of all to me so far.

Bear spray is less potent than police pepper spray.

I believe there's less OC and bear spray.

I would have assumed it's more, but it's less. Yeah, I think the such sensitive nose.

Very sensitive nose is to be clear, it's still very unpleasant for humans like I consider myself to have a nose of every sensitivity and having been a recipient a bear spray, it's highly unpleasant.

Right, But I just I thought, you know, I would have assumed you said I've been bear sprayed, like, oh, that's like way more hardcore.

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the bear spray. Part of the reason I think that it has less of the OC oil in it is that it has to be propelled out at a velocity that allows it to be used even if the bear is coming at you and the wind is blowing towards you. Right, so the bear is coming with the wind, so you're spraying of pay and then the spray would be you don't want the spray to all be blown back to you. Right, you want it to be able to get out, to create

Right.

I will link to both these studies. Everything he's done, which I think is really cool because this stuff impacts like your safety in Griz country. Everything he's done is available publicly for free. Hell yeah, very unusual in the in the academic research space, right, But I think it's great because it allows you to look at this best play as a Perceibo article and then you can go find the study. I will link it right here, and you can say, huh, sure, seems like this guy can't read a study.

And does he has he read those studies he claims to.

Yeah, he quotes soon, So it's not.

That he just isn't aware of them.

He just doesn't believe the expert because of a personal expert.

I I think he either didn't grasp the table or didn't grasp so the So I again, like the person who wate these studies is extremely easy to contact, and anyone doing reasonable journalism would do so.

Right.

So I guess is he saying I read this study and it's wrong, Or is he saying I read the study and it agrees.

With me, saying I read the study and it says best bray doesn't work. It agrees with me?

Yet?

Oh no, yeah, yeah, he could have just emailed the other Could it just usk?

Could it just usk?

Yeah?

So, like there are incidents in the study which are it considered successful and non successful uses. Some of the non successful uses are with a black bear, when you spray it and it comes back later. That is still the brown bo is not killing you in that situation, right, I'm sorry, a black bear.

It still works. Like efficacy doesn't mean permanent.

Yeah, And at some point when you're making a study like this, you have to decide, like what a You're trying to create a binary relationship about his theories of things. Right that the other study he wrote was efficacy of Firearms for their defense in Alaska. It's worth noting that in the Efficacy of Firearms study, more than one hundred and twenty bears died out of a data set something like two hundred and fifty. None of the best bray bears died. Oh that's a lot right, yeaheah, it's a lot.

And I feel like it's better if everybody survives the encounter.

Yeah, it's better for all of us if we use this extremely well researched tool.

Right and again, having read zero studies, I read zero studies, but I know only one point one person's a year are killed by bears. Yeah, so if this never worked and couldn't work, more people would have been killed by bears.

Maybe, Yeah. Yeah, certainly a lot of people who use the best Bray didn't get killed by bears, right.

Like, none of them did.

It is possible to use best brain and be killed by bears, like.

Especially happened to It's happened to maybe fifty people reside.

Yet residues of bear spray will attract bears in the like, well that's unfair. Well it's an interesting smell, right, and they have an amazing nose, so I'm guessing like they will come check it out. And I know that, Like, there are instances where people have, for instance, used best Pray in the way that one might use bug spray. I use spraying their tent.

That's not going to work.

Yeah, yeah, well you're going to bring them in.

That's like saying, I'm going to use this gun to protect myself by making a circle around me with bullets.

Yeah yeah, exactly, smearing myself with.

It, but the bullets in a circle around my Yeah.

It's not quite cargo cult thinking, but like it's a you know, it's like magical thought process. I guess, like that's not how best pay was you spray it at the.

Bear homeopathic gun is where you just lick the bullets.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's talk about the things that you can do, right, Like you can keep a clean camp. This is really big, don't attract them? Yeah, so if we look at like Yosemite, right, Yosemite and that that like Smite Kings Canyon Sequoia Park System, you can't bring bear spray in there, right, Oh, but you have to have a bear can. So I've backpacked in that area. They have done surveys that showed that, like most people were acquainted with best bear practices, but we're not following them on the trail.

So it's not that they didn't know better.

Is the don't care?

I think people it's hard to like fathom a giant, several hundred pound half ton creature. It's going to come in and steal my cliff bars, right, but it will And that gets hard to fathom how good their smell.

Is because they love a delicious snack. Like they're berry boys. They're berry boys. They're going to come get your little tree.

Yeah, they love they love a high carbohydrate like energy snack. They're endurance athletes. They want to eat your cliff bar, if your keito, you're fine.

But they would like candy.

But they love candy. Yeah, Like I know it would.

Be unethical to give a bear.

Wrong, So we want to keep a clean camp or in bad country. Right, that means stuff with odors. It's not just our food, but also like the maybe the clothes we cooked in. We have a scented toothpaste stuff like that.

Wow.

Yeah, like if I had, if I was in the habit of using a shampoo smelled like I think they spoke to doctor Smith about this, like he said, if I used apricot shampoo, probably wouldn't bring.

It with me.

Wow, because they just want to come check out that sweet tree.

Yeah.

Like it's kind of you think that they eat berries, right, you make yourself smell like a fruit, Like it's kind of on you, Like I get Yeah, it makes sense.

Like Winnie the Pooh, he's just like following his nose you find a sweet tree.

Yeah.

I don't want to blame anyone for not knowing things. None of us are born knowing anything. And it's not like they issue PSAs about bears every day.

I bet there's a pamphlet at the trailhead.

Yeah, there's definitely.

Well, when you go to Yosemite, you have to sign him with a ranger for a wilderness permit and then they'll give you the once over. But there are other things we would not do.

Right.

I would not sleep alone in a tent in bear country, said, and there are two of us, had probably two tents, right, Like, just gives one of us a chance to deploy the bear spray and the bear does come in. We can get bear fences, we can try very hard not to surprise bears. Right. So I was trail running in Alaska last year in some pretty thick brush, Right, I used a little bear bell. It's dorky, but like.

Oh, it sounds cute as hell.

I want to look at that.

Well, there's an unfortunate video that you'll probably see when you google bear bell of a hiker who thought the bell bell with a repellent, and so the black bear is charging him and he's waving, just.

Ring the bell at it all.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, So it sounds like people.

Are purchasing these solutions but not understanding the functions of them.

Yeah, And like, I don't want to blame people for that, because part of the way we get to a place where we could destroy so much of our megafauna, is it so a few people care about or understand it, Right, that's an education issue that we can't solve quickly or like on a podcast. I think that it would behoove anyone who's going camping in especially like Griz country, right, so in Alaska, Wyoming, not all of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho.

I mean I've been I've been pepper sprayed, and the bear can't even go like wash his hair with dawn.

Right, Yeah, he can't stand in the shower like looking down like I know this this. I guess the positive outcome of that is that the bear will be like likely to not want to come around people so much, right, because they'll associate this negative attraction with the best bray.

Right, So this seems like it's that it does work. And then also if we're all doing it, you'll you want to do it as much. Yeah, because the bears will leave us alone.

Yeah, we have the solution for being in bear country, right, Like, it's carry our bear repellent.

Unless the bears are like me.

You know, I've been parpigedprayed by all kinds of cops and I'm still going to go look and see whether I'm.

Just keep on keep on tanking. Yeah, I'm not a very stupid man. It's like the uh, the Yosemite. I guess it just keeps spraying me.

These people.

Why this. There were some instance where I guess brown bears got sprayed to charge the person, but like as they were charging, the person sprayed them and they came through the spray. But then there's a spray got more condensed, like I know they're not the person over and kept on charging. Okay, I don't want, Yeah, which is obviously not a great outcome, but it's a better outcome than you're getting warreed by the bear, right.

Better than it eat my bear.

But like, I really want to push back on this narrative that we should be all carrying firearms.

First of all, most people, most people don't need a gun.

Yeah, I mean, like, there are reasons to warn guns ion, lots of them, but like, defending yourself from bears probably isn't one unless you're already very proficient with firearms, and even then.

I don't want to kill a bear.

Like, but I just to think if you're telling every casual hiker who goes to where bears might be that they need to own a gun, a lot of those people would not have otherwise owned a gun. Yeah, are not good at handling a gun. In a situation where they need to use the gun against the bear, it's going to go badly. But also, now there's a gun in their home that they would not otherwise have had in their home, and the odds of a firearm accident in the home are now higher.

Yeah, well yeah, infinitely high than it didn't have one.

Right, So it's not going to work out for you. In this limited instance that you think you need it for.

Yeah, and then you've introduced to dangerous.

Now you have a gun you didn't need.

Yeah, Like, it is impossible. May if you are getting If I am getting more by a grizzly bear and you bearst pray that bear, I will have I see eyes and hopefully survive. If you shoot that bear, it is very possible, and it has happened that you will also shoot me.

Because the average person not a good shot under controlled circumstances. Bear attack not a controlled circumstance.

Yeah, like everyone like this is especially a thing with men, right, they will tend to overestimate their ability with firearms dramatically. In my experience, this is not a fuck around and find out situation. You don't want to find out that you're not very good at shooting as a grisly bear is charging you.

And even if you are very good at shooting at the range, you're not in this situation.

You're not.

You have to deploy the firearm right now, and we have to.

Like, your hands are shaking, there's piss running down your life.

We're scared. Yeah, you have to incapacitate the bear, like I've been in up close situations with big animals. It's scary, like thinking I'm going to die now. It has a profound effect on the human body, and it's not one that does and it does it doesn't actually enhance your john Wick characteristics. Yeah, so I would highly recommend it. If you're going to bear country, you get some bear spray, don't fly, but you can't fly with bare spray, So you're gonna have to buy it when you get buy

It works.

It is statistically more effective than using firearms.

It works.

What does it cost like forty bucks?

Yeah, not even that.

And how much does a gun cost? A lot more than that, Yeah.

A lot more than that, especially if you're going to actually practice with it. Right, if you're going to get bear spray, I would sugest you get a You can get a dummy. It's just got water in it and you can practice. Right. There are a couple of safeties on a bear spray. One I do have one here.

With like within arms reach in your arms.

You want to go one over here? Yeah, I got my RACKUS best bray, but like it's a safety on it and there's actually a zip tie when you get it to stop the safety coming off, just to stop it like blog in your back going off in the shipping container, yeah, or in the in the walmart or whatever. So you've got to whatever of that, right, And then they they sell packs which has the water one and the spicy one, and you're going to practice deploying the

Googled bear spray and the pictures, the pictures that are used to advertise the spray.

I gotta see this. What's yeah, how do I send you sen you can just put it in the chat.

This is not a real picture.

Is this a real picture of a man spraying of bear?

Because the bear is sort of enveloped in this cloud of spray, So it just looks like one of those soft effect paintings of the bears still wet in like a cloud.

It looks like it looks like like a I'm a big fan of T shirts of wolves howling at the moon.

It's a bear, old man's brain.

I don't know why if you're staging it. This is bizarre because.

That's not a real picture of something of that happened.

I don't know.

I don't think so, because there's no bare body and you can see this. You can see the bush right like it's just its head. They haven't bothered.

It's very close.

Yeah, so yeah, and the bear doesn't look too upset. It's kind of Yeah. That is a fascinating case. If we scroll down, there are there are better images of people using bear spray, which.

Is incredible, incredible product photos that.

Yeah, that is really quite remarkable. Suggest everybody who is going into bear country buy bear spray and practice using it like it's better for you. It's better for bears. It's cheaper than a gun. You can if you want, by a bear fence, the electric fence that goes around your camp if camping in the back country, I think that's a good idea. If you're in an area with

Ask a park ranger. He'll tell you that's his job.

Yeah, some of their jobs depends what depends what kind of rangers they are. Some of them are cops. The overwhelming bulk of evidence suggests that the way to go with bears is bear spray until a bear kills an oil rig. We will have we will continue to have bears on our landscape, but it's something that we should like, genuinely care about, really, like the trophic cascade is not as much of a of a thing as it was

No, you have to tell me about wolves too.

A whole other episode. Yeah, well, fucking wolf management is a whole other thing. The bears have entered the discourse this week because a bear killed someone. We don't talk about it when someone kills a bear, right the go ask it. They're coming bears from aircraft right now. And I'm not saying that, like a human life is equal to a bear life, but I'm saying that.

Hunting from an aircraft is such bitch behavior.

I know, if you want to take a bear, do it with a knife like a like a hero or a bow.

But or you know, do it Lewis and Clark style, use a musket.

That's fine.

Yeah, yeah, right, eight of your friends and a musket at the edge of the river and you don't have best brace. You're only optionists to jump into the room twenty feet clip with a bear that you could have left alone. So yeah, I want to. I guess like end by saying that, like the outdoors isn't entirely safe,

It's so sad for them in there.

Yeah, Like it's the meaning to me to see something demean for my entertainment in that fashion. Like we can't comprehend animals outside of the habitat. I don't think like seeing a grisbee bear in Alaska of trying to eat salmon or being a black bear in California doing its thing hamingson berries. Like that's cool, and I want you all to have that, and I want your children and grandchildren to have that, and so, like, I think we should be very skeptical about people making safety based arguments

Like most of these animals will not bother you if you leave them alone.

Yeah, and like if very very ocasionally people have been killed by cougars who are not bothering the cougar, right, like.

Very occasionally, you know, a freak accident, Yeah, doesn't justify destruction of an ecosystem.

People get killed by lightning, but we're not just killing clouds. People get killed by cars. We don't get bombing the Ford factory. I understand the desire to be safe, but like, we will take away a lot of things that are really beautiful if we just want to be safe.

But again, we're controlling the wrong variables.

If you're worried about people dying in unfair and you know, terrible accidents.

There are things we could talk about.

Yeah, there are policy decisions that could be made that would save thousands and thousands of lives.

Yeah, if you want people to be safe and be concerned about free healthcare.

Bears have killed sixty six people.

I bet that many people died today from not being able to get their insulin.

Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, there's a perfect example. Right, Like, if you want to keep people safe, then think about things that will keep them safe. And I think we can. We can very easily keep people bears safe. But the threat to the bears is us. That's it. The only other thing that kills bears really is other bears, and so it's on us therefore to advocate, right, Like the bears can't advocate for themselves. Luckily they had people who

Right.

But nonetheless, it is a majestic thing to see on the landscape and something that we should take care that. You know, we don't let corporate interest and people who find it entertaining distory.

I would love to see a bear.

Okay, we'll do that. We'll add that to our list. Okay, tep me to see a bear. Yeah, I am going to take Molly camping. We will. Maybe we'll go to We'll go to we go Yellowstone area, like I've never been to Yell, you know, have you not been to Yellowstone?

I've never been out worse.

Wow, Okay, I've got some friends who got a cabin outside the park. Maybe we could have a little cabin trip.

Sophie's and mid Yellowstone.

We can go in there and like, look at the guys, enjoy the Yellowstone ecosystem. No disrespect to my Yellowstone friends, but that's a lot of tourists. Like I ain't going outside to be around that many people.

Yeah, like there's there's Yellowstone style nature outside the bounds of the park.

You go there.

Yeah, I mean even if you just go, if you're getting away from you can get it. Just get away from Old Faithful and that that park and you can get away from people. Just fine. But yeah, we can go. We could go to Yellowstone, see it there. Maybe see an elk. Pretty cool, Elk.

Make a pretty co I bet that's big as hell.

Yeah, elk's the biggest ship. Like like a cow with horns. Well not the cows, cats have horns. Elk antlers a mistake. But yeah, we could go to or like that, like the Greater Yeat like outside of the park, like that Wayoming area just outside of Yellowstone. It's really beautiful. Be a fun place to go camping. Maybe see a bear, have a clean camp. Maybe we can find out a way to find a way to expense that bear fence.

That's what I'm saying. Podcasts from out there it becomes business.

Yeah.

Yeah, we will podcast from bear country proving that we can happily co exist with bears.

Thank you to all the ferret people.

By the way, I can't believe how many contacted you.

Yeah, massive outreach of the ferret people. So if you are someone who can help me, get on one of the ferret counting surveys. I will count ferrets with you. We will make a ferret podcast, and we will change America's perception of the blackfooted ferret. On your behalf.

It's already working.

You got me.

I love them now.

Yeah. Muley's Team Ferret. Yeah. You can't see this because it's a podcast, but she has a massive tattoo.

It's one of the biggest around the neck.

Yeah, around the neck. Yeah, and there's a further one in the lip, but it says team Ferret.

Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah, Money's become a ferret advocate. I hope you have all become ferret and black bear advocates. Send me pictures of your bears. Money, do you know what fat bear week is? Before we go?

That is my favorite thing about bears is fat.

Bear Okay, sick good yeah, bears getting plump in the the autumn before they hibernate.

Is I mean, how could you hate them? How could you hate them? They're just roly poly little guys hunting for a little sweet treat.

Yeah, their bulking cycle is incredible to me, Like the way a bear just adds thickness in a relatively short period of time. It's remarking powerful. Yeah, it's powerful. That lives the power of salmon. Maybe we didn't have trawlers, we'd all eat more fish. But yeah, check out Fat Bear Week if you haven't, if you're not from the US, I hope this has been fun. Fund a little diversion into animals that live here. They used to live all

They have bears too, Yeah, yeah, I got to look up where bears live.

Yeah, they lived. We could do a whole other one on the jaguar was there being fucked by the border wall right now pretty badly. But there'll be a fun episode up in over an, Arizona that Yeah, there's pretty cool.

Animals are friends, don't kill them.

Welcome to It could happened here a podcast about what workers can do when they try. I am your host, Mia Long, and with me today to talk about a company known, I guess in Portland for being a place for you shop and known most other places for being the people who make pens is Morgan and Renee from Bujie Workers United and Morgan Renee welcome to the show.

Thank you, Hi, Thank you Mia.

Yeah.

So, and obviously I guess, as you may have gotten from the word union and the title probably continuing the word union, I don't know, we haven't written it yet, is that. Yeah, one of the Muji stories in Portland is unionizing. Can you talk a little bit about like what Muji is for people who are unaware of this slash, don't follow pens and or or haven't been to the store.

Yeah, so Muji is probably I would describe it as a worldwide Japanese minimalist lifestyle department store. And that's a lot of words to say. It's a department store that is for essentially basics. Muji is short for a full name that essentially translates to no brand, and that's the idea that they're trying to push for and they're trying to show to people that it's like an eco friendly company and they try and push like high quality products.

Yeah, which is a really cool and B So we're talking about how this is the only one in the West coast. This is mostly a Japanese company that operates a little bit in the US and does things here, right my understanding, So.

It is a Japanese company. It's actually primarily operates like all over the world. It was began in Japan in the eighties, I believe, if I know my company history correctly, but they pretty rapidly expanded to across Asia and Europe and then have also since expanded into Africa and the Americas.

Yeah, so it's relatively recent. And I guess the thing that's even more relatively recent is he all starting to organize a union. So can I ask how did that start? And what was the sort of things that started to get the ball rolling on it?

So I guess the way that organizing started was back in November of twenty twenty five, maybe shortly before that. We had a round of appraisals. These are like yearly end of fiscal year appraisals that are technically supposed to be the end of the fourth quarter. Typically they get

Yes, it went as low as around twenty five cents.

Yeah, that's right, I.

Have done the math. But like, is that sub inflation?

Like I, yes, that is sub inflation.

It tends to be. There are employees who have been working for more than two years who still get paid around minimum wage.

Jesus Christ.

In addition to that, the staff members who are keyholders and full timers and above get bonuses, and the bonuses are directly tied to the amount of money that the store makes over the target amount for the month, and they drastically increased the targets for the year going forward, which meant that because of that, our bonuses were getting lower. So this year, for the last month since that race, I've actually been making less money per month than I was the year before.

Jesus Christ, So you're getting pay cuts basically, yes, Jesus Christ. After winning Store of the Year, incredible stuff. Incredible stuff from the people who are running their company in an extremely normal way.

That was the spark that set this push for the union ablaze. And so in November I contacted the IWW Industrial Workers of the World and received a response, And so at first it was just me and one of the IWW representatives that we were meeting together to talk about forming a union, and we ended up having those meetings somewhat regularly, and the amount of people attending those meetings slowly started to grow, so it was maybe like

The first meeting I went to was at the hall where it was essentially just us grieving about our working conditions while the seasonals were there, and sort of it was I don't know how much it was in the works for you, how much stuff you had done up until that point, but I think that was the moment where we sort of became confident as a body in our prospects were unionizing. And then ye, the Pollux.

Thereafter, Yeah, and the Pollux ended up starting to pull around around ten people. I think the highest attended one was actually twelve. And so when you have a shop that has about thirty two people in the bargaining unit, that is about a third of the shop attending an early union meeting while we're still in the underground phase of organizing, and we managed to successfully remain under round up until we decided to go public on our own terms.

Which I think there's two things there. I want to I want to come back to. Wond is the like, oh yeah, well, of course management. Management never found out about the UNI, but just left early because their management. And it's like, oh right, no, yeah, what happens if you leave just randomly walk off your job site like forty five minutes early, you're fucked. But managements just like, yeah, fuck it, I'm just done. I'm just out, Like I'm just I'm just leaving. Everything's gonna be fine, even if

The POTLUCKX came about because I had the idea that people are going to be more willing to come to an event if it wasn't just going to be a meeting where they sat down and had to talk shop and they had to start talking about work while they're off the clock.

But they'd be more much more.

Likely to come if the meeting was framed more as a way to just hang out with their coworkers and eat dinner.

Yeah.

So this actually came from my experience when I was a kid. I grew up behind and even though I'm no longer Behi, the way that our community did it back home was mostly through community feasts and having prioritizing, like the feasts first and then the religious discussion later. So taking that sort of and putting a more of a union spin on it was the idea behind that, and it was a massive hit. Oh yeah, Renee, do you have any more thoughts on that?

Yeah?

I think the fact too that our worker body is I don't know if uniquely is the right word, but especially tight knit and supportive of one another really just sort of helped things flow in a very natural and easy going way. It was just super like salient for everything to come about out of these pollocks. We just sort of like sat down and immediately started like complaining

Yeah, it feels bad sometimes to have to cut these complaints periods short because I think they can go on for two to three hours if if we're not careful, and I think the early ones did to actually go on for two to three hours, and we had clearly cought books that we didn't get any actual business done. We just spent two to three hours eating food and

Yeah.

I think it has this effect of like realizing everything because I mean, even I would walk in and be thinking, like, you know, this is like such a taxing endeavor unionizing the workplace, and yeah, yeah, every once in a while you'd have some sort of hesitation, I guess, but then every time I would leave, it would just sort of be like, this is like this is the only option and we're definitely going to do it, and we're all with it and it feels good.

Well yeah, yeah, it seems like from from everything that I've heard and everything that you're saying, it seems like it's a really powerful way to sort of both combat atomization both. Is it just like, oh, this is like a social space where you and the people you work with who are your friends can exist with each other, and then also in a we can combat sort of alienation and adimisation and stuff by just doing the union work of Oh my god, we all have all of.

These issues with our bosses.

Yeah.

Yeah, and when we return, we're going to talking and going to ask about the issues with the bosses. But first here I don't know the product services that support this podcast.

We are back.

I was like, oh, I have a good transition. I can go from complaining about the bosses to talk about what the bosses are doing. And then I was like, shit, I was supposed to cut an add We didn't think of that one fast enough, but you know, speaking speaking

So there's a lot of small things that have kind of piled up, and honestly, I say small things, but each one of these is kind of just like shocking on its own, but not rising necessarily to anyone that's worked in the service industry at all. Yeah, So, beyond the races, there's just been like a long pattern of emotional abuse from the bosses. People have been have been yelled at for pretty much no reason. The bosses have directly insulted workers' abilities, like on the floor as they're

Yeah, in your job, you have to be around people all the time because you're doing a service. God, I hate this, like getting weird pseudo eugenesis shit about disease that's just everywhere now that runs the Department of yeah, Health and Human Services of the CDC.

Like this, this weekend or this last weekend at the time of recording was Memorial Day weekend, and on SAT, the peak day of that weekend, there were three thousand customers approximately in store over the course of the day. And reminder that we are a team of thirty two people in total, and so of course not all thirty two people are going to be at the store at

Yeah, that's like a small and medium sized like convention that's just running through your store over the course of one day. It's like, oh, yeah, everyone has like pax pocks or whatever they're like convention plague is. But that's just like going to work. It's like oh yeah, no, of course, apparently somehow you're supposed to like magically have the like anti disease talismans. Yeah, it's like the plagued masses.

And on top of that, I've called out maybe once a month. I think that maybe there's one month where it was twice a month since January. And I've already used up all the allocated sick time that I get for a year, Jesus. And that's with one of the better sick pay plans as a full timer. And so I can't imagine what people are having to go through at part time, where they're already not getting enough hours

Oh my god, we're just having your sick hours rejected on the app.

But it's an app.

Oh my god.

Yeah, that's right.

If your sick hours can get rejected, you don't have sick hours like yeah.

And there's more too. It doesn't end there. They apply policies that we have this employee handbook that has this list of requirements and expectations and it is not really a huge part of our employment typically, but the policies

What Jesus Christ, Oh my god, that is so incredibly shitty, and that's got to be illegal somehow, even under like unhinged American labor law. That just feels like it feels like a very open form of discrimination. But Jesus Christ, oh my god.

Yeah, do you have anything to add renee.

Along those lines, just sort of like being asked to profile people. All employees can be scheduled to cover the securities breaks, which basically just involves standing around one of the entrances and reporting anything quote fishy on the radios, anything suspicious, they say suspicious.

So they could just co opt you into being a security guard.

What, Yeah, the security guard doesn't have any duties regarding like loss prevention. All the managers do that as part of their duties, I guess. But yeah, so they just sort of say suspicious people.

And on that note too, there have been times where

So you're getting yelled at for doing the thing you were told to do that is explicitly not part of your job, that's supposed to be the manager's job, and the managers are pissed off that you're not doing what's nominally their job. That you also and the written thing you're not supposed to do. Exactly incredible, incredible, incredible catch twenty two logic here, it's real, just oh, yeah, you're

Yeah, yeah, naturally, there's not really anything that we can do about this besides unionize and besides start taking actions on our own, because the law certainly isn't going to help us for this. Even organ state law, which is which hans to be more protective of workers than other states are. They're incredibly overwhelmed right now with requests and going through the bully Bureau of organ Labor and Industries I think is the acronym going down the Bullie websites lists.

So they've contracted out their HR department, so you're just like talking to their car or is it that you can't communicate with them directly? And that's very weird.

So they have an HR department. The workers at the physical location cannot communicate with HR. We are not given their their phone numbers, or their emails or anything like that. All of our HR communication has to be done through our general store manager. So when we have problems with the general store manager or assistant store managers, we can't really go to HR because we have to go through the very people that we're having problems with in order to reach our HR.

Incredible. It's all means to make HR even faker, which is incredible. Oh good lord.

It would also be remiss, I guess, to forget about the sexual assaults, Oh Jesus correct, Maybe not specifically sexual assault, but definitely sexual harassment possible sexual assault that has been raised to management before, where the management supposedly pushed those complaints to HR, but then HR would wait for weeks before doing anything about it. Oh my god, this happened

Oh my god, Jesus.

They didn't say outright, but they implied everything up to job loss for the people that were talking about this.

Oh my god.

And they started pulling people into the office and essentially having one on one conversations Oh my god, that were honestly quite scary to the people that were trying to spread the word about this, and they created quite a hostile store environment for a long time. Around that time was actually the first time that we had attempted to try and get a push to unionize, but that ended up dissolving and that was essentially the end of that up until on this most recent push.

Yeah.

God, that's really hideous, both the way in which they just pushed it up the latter to HR and then just didn't do anything about it for like a fucking month that that also just the only thing they did do about it was retaliating against people who were trying to talk about it. That is Jesus as disgusting.

Yeah, about the most that they did during that month to the actual coworker in question that was doing the harassment was they tried to maintain some degree of physical separation between him and the other coworkers and that was it. They kept him on the roster, They kept him at the same positions that other people were working. He had essentially all the same job responsibilities as other people and still had a pretty high degree of contact with other coworkers during this whole time.

Yeah, So the people who were trying to speak out. I guess it until this I was fired, we're getting punished more than he.

Was, essentially, Yeah, Jesus all the way up until he was finally fired. And I don't know what it was that actually got them to do it this time, but they wanted to wait until they had got something actually on camera, I believe, but it's kind of hard for you to catch something like harassment words on camera.

Yeah.

If their bar for sexual harassment is stuff that they can catch on camera, they're never going to get most instances of harassment, and they're not doing their their proper job investigating these accusations.

Yeah, and that also means that they're delivered strategy is to wait for someone to get hurt again, exactly. That's right, They're just throwing them to the fucking lions dend. Their strategy to detect that a bus is about to hit someone is to push someone in front of the bus and take a picture of it, which is just so unbelievably unacceptable.

Yeah.

And I want to be clear too that this whole list is very much non exhaustive. There have been so many cases of just patterns of abuse for management and it's not possible for me to go down the entire list of things. I mean, as I mentioned previously, it would be two to three hours of people complaining about stuff that they had gone through at work during these meetings, and occasionally you get some repetition, but this is something

Yeah, every day there's another unique core that someone is experiencing, and I guess this brings us to Okay, so how do you make the horrors stop? And that is unionizing. So yeah, let's talk about what's been happening recently in terms of like how the union is immobilizing and about the upcoming election, which will be a few days after you're hearing this, assuming you're listening to this the day it comes out.

Yeah, So we've been sort of ramping up a little bit. It's been being inflowing since we started, you know, last like November, but we're really trying to kick it into gear, get people aware, get people back engaged. So we have a few things we've been doing well. On May first, for May Day, we tabled with the IWW and just started a petition just for signatures from the community. For support for acknowledgment if we ever need to, you know, pull it out and show our bosses that you know,

We had a small article published about us by the Northwest Libor Press that was then picked up by the Portland Mercury.

That's right. Yeah, So we did that. And then other than that, we're sort of fighting some recently published propaganda from our boss is with display a hilarious amount of misinformation, Yeah, average boss communication.

The other big thing that's been happening is that the reason that the election is happening so long after our initial march and declaration of intense to unionize is that the bosses have been trying to divide up the bargaining unit in a fairly strange case where the employer has been contending that the merchandising staff, which is essentially the back of the house staff but only like a sub section of the back of the house staff, are not

I was.

I was not shocked to find out that the case was decided in our favor on the community of interest issue, because that would be like saying that the back of the houseworkers at a restaurants can't unionize with the front of the houseworkers just because they have different job descriptions.

Yeah, Chiverish right.

However, I was surprised at first. I was surprised at least that we managed to win on the issues of supervisory authority with the keyholders. I thought that it would take a pretty solid case in order for us to defend against that. And huge props to our friend, who I'm not sure if they're comfortable being name dropped as an IWW member like five to the world, so I'm not going to name them, but it is large thanks to this friend of ours that'll be on that case.

Yeah, hell yeah. It's a sort of different version of like the very common tactic of because bosses want there to be more time in between when you file your paperwork to unionize and the election, because it gives them more time to do intimidation and fear tactics, and like that period in between designed to unionize and getting to actually do the vote is one of the perios where

Yeah.

Basically, yeah, it was very strange across examining my manager under oath hell yeah, and then going to work. I didn't manage to attend the entirety of either of the days of the hearing because I had to close. I had to go to work at noon on both days that the hearing was. That's so nuts, which is why I wasn't there for the full hearing for either of

Oh my god, Oh my god. It's also that's so nuts. You didn't get time off to go to the union hearing exactly.

Yeah, I mean they were getting paid right, that's.

Why they were getting paid.

Oh my god, the managers that were testifying in favor of the employer capitalism.

Bad system.

Wow, we could possibly have expected this.

Yeah, it was actively a challenge to find witnesses to testify for us, because the people who would be able to call us witnesses or coworkers are people who are maybe working the days of the hearing and can't actually get time off to come testify because they have to be at work.

Oh my god, that's so fucked.

There was one person who we approached because we were hoping that they would testify for us, who couldn't because she was working that day. It's too too complicated of a process to want to try and like subpoena them and legally get them to have the time off to come to the hearing.

Jesus.

So we ended up just having to figure out a way to present witnesses and have a slightly weaker case because of it. And thankfully that didn't end up mattering. But for a minute I was worried that we wouldn't be able to have as good of a case as we could have because we were not able to get a keyholder on the stand like we were hoping.

Yeah, I'm glad, I'm glad you're able to pull it together. That's really impressive. And yeah, that you still just beat them even though they had And I guess that is one of the lessons of this is like, yeah, if you're willing to put the work in and work together and figure out how to navigate the system and figure out where you can apply pressure, like, yeah, you can beat a bunch of people who have way way more resources than you do because they're usually just wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah, I want to actually really drive that point home that neither I or my co representative have experience in any sort of like legal fields. Neither of us are even lost students. We are just the people that decided to step up and take on this role. And I don't think that there is some like special unique quality about us that allowed us to do it. It was

Hell yeah, I guess if I was really on my game here, I would have something about like the concept of the organic intellectual, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't even think that's really what's going on here. It's just like, in the same way that like economics is designed to be esoteric, and you know, like finance is designed to be difficult to understand. But in the immortal words of Dan Elson, there are plenty of c students

And I don't want to discount the amount of support that we received from the rest of our coworkers as well. Yeah, this was truly a group effort, and everyone helped out in their own small ways, whether it was helping take care of social media posts, whether it was helping cook

Hell yeah, So speaking of everyone coming together and helping to work for the process, if people want to help you all, what can they do.

We are looking actually at a bit of a financial struggle right now. The biggest thing is that we don't have enough the funds at the moment to go on strike, not for any significant duration at least. Yeah, we have a go fundme Mojie Workers United.

Yeah, we will put that in the description.

The other thing is that we are looking for a lot of social media support. Actually, Mushi is a very media driven company and we are trying to set up an Instagram account that has a lot of visibility. You can follow us also Moodie Workers United on Instagram. And it seems like people have been sharing our articles and across the internet, both the WLP article about us and then now you're interviewing us, which is an enormous help to trust.

Mia.

Thank you. We super appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you so much, of course.

Happy.

I don't know if you have anything to add to that, Renee.

Yeah, just the Instagram. We have lots of very talented artists working Muji like everyone. It's great graphic designers, a lot of just very fun and cool people. So yeah, I'm sure that will be expressed in our future social media posts. Yeah.

Hell yeah, what we'll link that description too.

Awesome, thank you Mia.

Yeah.

On a one final thing, you want to plug direct action?

Yes, I do.

So.

We've had We've spent a lot of time talking about the legal side of unionization because our union is currently seeking federal recognition with the NLRB. I want to emphasize that this is not the end of unions. The goal is not a contract. The goal is to use direct action to enact the changes that you want to see in your workplace. For what are probably obvious reasons, I don't want to talk about specifically stuff that we have planned or maybe not even stuff that we've done in

And the union is very aware, you know, regarding their respective capacities to help what they can, you know, and cannot do their limits. And I think just after you know, working together enough, everything marries in a very effective way. And and yeah, even just like like all of these sort of direct actions that that Luna was naming are just came out of our meetings, just ideas that people think might be fun to do, or or you know, people sharing their hobbies and and want to share them

It's well, yeah, I think it touches on something that's really important about all of this, which is, you know, people will in the abstract talk about unions as like social institutions, but like what that actually means is this, Like, yeah, it's a place where you and your friends and the

Yeah, yeah, welcome to It could happen here a show about things falling apart, the thing falling apart the past few years, the Democratic Party that's foot we're going to be talking about to I am joined by Sophie Ray Lichterman.

Hello, Hi, I'm not excited about this.

This is great. Last time we were on an episode together, we were talking about our two favorite Democrats, Bill and Hillary Clinton. Ah.

Yes, they gave me COVID at the DNC. I'll never forgive them.

Not talking about them today, but we are talking about the DNC. The other DNC, the one who puts on the DNC, the Democratic National Committee. So we're gonna be talking about the DNC autopsy. Oh boy. First, some background. Yes, after Democrats lost the House, the Senate, and the presidency in twenty twenty four, if I'm reading that correctly, including losing the popular vote, something that has not happened in twenty years. The Democratic National Committee, the DNC, wondered why

Who votes Ken martin In to be the chair because I know his careerer is basically Minnesota guy, yes in turning government jobs, vice president chair, And then.

Basically around four hundred members of state party chapters are chosen to be members of the Democratic National Committee, who then in turn vote on national party leadership and decide how primaries operate, though if a sitting president is a Democrat,

For the DNC chair, that logic is ridiculous.

No, because that's not the real reason why the report wasn't released. We will get to why the report wasn't okay very soon.

That sounds like a majorly half assed reason, So okay, say more, say more.

I'm listening.

As the public release of the autopsy was continuously delayed in twenty twenty five and then just eventually canceled, the speculation about the contents of the report grew that the DNC must be hiding the report because it's f findings on why the Dems lost so bad in twenty twenty four must run contrary to the interests of party elites.

And what is in this report huh.

We will also be getting into what's in the report. Okay, Yeah, a lot of bad statistics, for one, unsourced graphs and discussions on whether you should spend more money on digital ads or TV ads is really really the bulk of the report, honestly. But before we get more into the report's findings, let's discuss the circumstances that led to the publishing of the unfinished autopsy and nearly a year after the finished version was supposed to come out. So this

Oh wow.

And despite being the sole person like tasked with running the report, and it's unclear how many people actually worked on it, but it was led by Riviera and it seems to be mostly be done by him. And despite that, Riviera only worked on it haart time while managing other contracts with sen and reporting that Riviera would say that he would only be available to conduct autopsy interviews before nine am or after seven pm or on weekends. That's

Was this weird or doing? What was his problem?

Not much? Yeah? Apparently not much, sir, because yeah, this report was like delayed almost a full year. Yeah seesh. Now, only after his initial Spring twenty twenty five deadline did Rivera actually reach out to state party chairs in battleground states to interview them for the report, and he did not contact like T. Harris campaign staff until September, and

Hold on, Hold on a second.

So he's not willing to do work after nine am or after seven pm?

Conduct please in that time.

No, can't do any of that time.

But yet he's just like using AI Yeah, great, DNC, feeling really hopeful.

Continue, what did CNN find?

So One of the slides that Riviera presented at this at this donor retreat attract the candidate's quote unquote area of focus by quote unquote content slash theme see an end notes quote. Riviera used an unclear methodology for the breakdown, assigning percentages to ten categories of content or theme. For Trump, Harris, and their running mates. The percentages in every column one for each candidate added up to well over one hundred percent.

Of course they didn't.

So he's just like making this stuff up, right, like it's it's again. They know. There's like an unclear methodology for the breakdown the fact these add up to over one hundred percent, Like, you cannot trust the legitimacy of any of this research now, So, after parts of the presentation were leaked to CNN, Scenan then obtained even more

These people, these fucking people.

I mean, I did not read the entire report intentionally so that you could tell me about it. But the highlights that have been spread across the internet is did not mention Gaza, did not mention Joe Biden's age, and did not mention when Joe Biden dropped out late effectively.

So well, we'll get into some of some of those in a little bit more detail. I think. One of the most interesting parts about the DNC's publishing of the unfinished report is that the published version of the autopsy contains annotations and corrections marked and read that the DNC added to the copy of the report as submitted by Riviera, and these were added for its public release. Okay, At the top of every single page, all one hundred and

I don't know, man, that doesn't really sound very trustworthy. Brouh, sounds pretty bad.

Sounds pretty bad. Here's a half asked report.

It's not very good, and I've delayed it for over a year, but yeah, I.

Guess here it is. No, it doesn't include any of the big issue things. Enjoy.

It's a stunning sequence of events that kind of highlights all of the issues that everyone already has with it with the Democratic Party. Like the guy who was chosen to do the autopsy just happens to be a personal friend of the DNC chair, and said friend then fails

It's just like reeks of like lazy AI work.

But all the like.

Left out sections that the things that don't add up, the misspellings.

Specifically the statistical and like factual errors, yeah, are really confusing, and it feels like someone's getting if not the actual writing, but it feels like the research was like AI assistant and in the way that you know AIS will shoot out different answers for the same question. Sure, so it feels like that in a few areas, and like like you've already mentioned, right, the report never brings up Biden's age or mental state as a factor contributing to the election.

No, it doesn't bring up the debate where now we know that like from an interview from doctor Joe Biden from a few weeks ago that she legitimately thought that Joe was having a stroke on stage during that debate with Donald Trump.

Even though she took him on to a different stage afterwards to tell him how good he did. And then they went to a waffle house. I mean, the things your due. You after you believe your husband has had a stroke.

When shit has hit the fan, Garrett, you go to waffle house.

Maybe maybe the waffle house actually is the move.

I'm saying the waffle house is the least shocking of the entire situation.

But that's not mentioned in there at all.

No, it says, quote, the White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and a half years to improve her standing before the candidates switch unquote. That's all it says about about switching from Biden to Harris. That's all it says.

I don't I don't disagree with that statement, because you know the amount of people that we spoke to when we went to both political conventions. One of the common things that they said about Kamala Harris is like how ineffective she spent and how they don't use her and how can we trust her when they don't even trust her to do basic things for the administration, which was one of the main Republican talking points about her, is like she has no skills, which is not true, but

No, okay.

The port never interrogets her, considers Biden's decision to run for reelection, or lay blame on those who encouraged and enabled that decision, nor does it identify the lack of a legitimate primary as a contributing factor leading to the results of the twenty twenty four election.

We're going to take a quick.

Break while I have, you know, an attack of my mind, your ads.

And we're bad.

Let's now pivot to how the report describes its own research methodology. This is quoting from the start of the autopsy quote. The report analyzes a range of publicly and commercially available data to identify actual investments, actions, and eventual voter behavior. The annalysis also includes qualitative data obtained in the form of in person and virtual interviews with more

This is just an obed.

A source that the DNC told CNN that Riviera did not even provide a list of names of the people he spoke to to the DNC, nor did he submit interview notes or recording. So there's no record that we have of like who these people are or why they were interviewed or what they actually said. And it's not like he's like quoting from people like with quotation marks. It's like regurgitating maybe portions of interviews into different text.

Great.

After the missing executive summary section, the report moves on to the electoral landscape, which has just very basic stuff. Quote. Millions of Americans are suffering from poor access to health care, manufacturing of job losses, and failing infrastructure, yet continued to be persuaded to vote against their best interests because they do not see themselves reflected in the America of the Democratic Party unquote. Just really basic stuff, very like average

This is so weird, just like a highly unnecessary tangent.

And it just shows this like uncomfortableness, and you know, on one side being uncomfortable, on the other side, just you know, also being incurious about why those elections have gone the way they did and what you can actually learn from them.

This baffling.

I'm not going to go over every single section of the report because there's a lot and the way the DNC annotated it gets interesting because at a certain point they stop actually trying to address or annotate specific claims and instead just to annotate the titles of entire sections, writing no sourcing provided for several claims in this section, and no evidence provided for many claims in this section. Public reporting and data contradict several claims.

Wow.

The introduction for the what Happened Electoral Overview section is also completely missing, as well as the national review section. These are just not included. The author did not provide those sections. The next section, the one on battleground state outcomes, contains very basic factual errors. In just the second sentence, quote, states which had consistently and reliably voted for Democratic candidates, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, voted for Trump. Unquote. All

I just kind of wonder if you, like uploaded this to one of the like AI softwares to tell you if it's AI or tell you if it was you know, plagiarized and those kinds of things, how much of it would be flagged?

Yeah?

Who knows, right, Like those sorts of tools aren't the most accurate themselves.

No, but it's just crazy.

But the level of errors is shocking.

Yeah.

Like, for instance, the report claims that in the twenty twenty four election, Democrats netted two seats in the House, flipping ten seats from Republicans while losing eight. This is not true. This is just not a true claim. Democrats netted one seat rather than two, flipping nine Republican health seats while losing eight Democrat seats. It's like, there's just small little errors like that that I'm like, how how.

Did you do this?

Unbelievable.

There's also a bunch of just unfounded claims about the intentions or assumptions coming from the Harris campaign, which may be true, but they're not supported in the actual report, Like you're not providing evidence, you're not providing citations for some of the claims about what the Harris Party intended in some of their messaging or stances. But I want to move on to one of the biggest takeaways that

Exactly is there any mention in these reports about Epstein?

No? No, oh no, yeah, no, absolutely not.

Yeah, because it.

Was baffling to me that because they needed to have Bill Clinton make the worst speech at the DNC, that they didn't target Trump over his relationship with Epstein at all during the campaign.

So you know, of course it's not in there.

I mean, yeah, there's a lot of a lot of things that you could hit Trump on, and a lot of yeah, Democratic ads like did maybe not in ways that people found convincing. You know, like when we were at the DNC, A lot of the anti Trump stuff was based around like the horror of January sixth, Yeah, not his regular failures as president, right, like, like like the day to day incompetence that he showed as president.

Oh my goodness.

The report claims that Harris struggled with defining herself beyond not being Trump and just framing the race as prosecutor versus felon. Report notes quote the truncated campaign timeline didn't help, but the campaign did not quickly resolve on how to tag Trump and define Harris. The report says that the enthusiasm gap was predictable, that Trump just generated more enthusiasm

Man, I forgot about that guy. I'm mad that you brought him up. I forgot he existed.

A lot of the section of this report is actually praising Josh Stein for how well he ran his campaign, while also finding it concerning of how much the vote Robinson was able to still get, except it gets the number wrong. Robinson did not get forty five percent of the vote. He got just over forty percent, And later in the report it says he got forty two point seven percent, which is also wrong. So it has two different numbers. The report says forty five and forty two

Of course it doesn't.

He doesn't say now. The report also praises Washington Governor Bob Ferguson, who was elected in twenty twenty four. Quote. Running on a platform of housing affordability, reducing costs for families throughout the state, and improving public safety allowed him to easily capture the governor's office. His message resonated with voters concerned about how bidonomics failed to lower the cost of a and how the Trump administration would gut avenues

Yeah, did nobody proofread or edit or peer review?

Well no, I think that is a big part of this, right, is that once the DNC received this, they saw how bad it was, and it was like, we don't even want to prove freedom edit this, Like this is just so bad, we just don't even want to deal with it anymore. Like it's just done right, We're just putting on the shelf.

But dude released it anyways.

Well, I mean they released it after public pressure because of you know, accusations that they were hiding certain findings that were damaging to the Democratic Party or the interests of party elites.

No, it's just it's just that somebody did a bad.

Job, when in fact it's just like, oh, this was just like a massive suck up, Like that's that's why you're hiding it, right right, Like this this this section that I just like read and the section on like Stein. Yeah, that's the only time where the word cost is used in relation to prices. Sick. This is this is the only mention of affordability.

Oh my god.

The report does not a single time mentioned inflation, Oh my god, except in adjusting like donation numbers for inflation. Like, it doesn't. It doesn't mention inflation as an issue. It does not mention the causes of inflation, messaging around inflation and how that may have been a factor contributing to the results of the election. The economy only gets mentioned six times.

Okay, just thinking back to when we were at the RNC, and I'm sure you had the conversations with you know, newly eligible voters, young males. Yeah, and you ask them, you know, why they were voting for Donald Trump. They would always say the economy it's the first thing.

It's the first thing. Yeah, and that's the core of Trump's ad strategy.

How are they not understanding that, you know, bringing out Oprah at the DNC instead of talking about how you're going to lower the price of milk and eggs and gas and help people get jobs, Like, how are they not realizing that you're not reaching normal human connection?

And this like continues to be a problem now, right, Yeah, people will look at macro economic fact sure and be like, by some accounts, the unum is actually not doing terrible, But those sorts of statements don't reflect the reality of Americans who are dealing with rising prices and may not be experiencing the same wage growth that some statistics show in the macro sense, and specifically the way that there's this like a condescending messaging around macroeconomics that really like

Yeah, there's this there's this announcer in the NBA that got slammed many years back for stating, well, you know, the team with the most points at the end of the game wins, and that's exactly what this is. They're like, hey, if you get more votes than the other guy.

You'll win it.

It's crazy, it's lazy that this whole, this whole thing reeks of just like, yes, lacksadaisical, insufferable laziness.

Yes, And I want to mention two other strategic implications please. One, Elections remain winnable with the right candidates and strategies, even in difficult environments. Demographics are tendencies, not destiny. And voter support is impacted good and bad through campaign choices.

Unquote, wow, thank you so much for saying that.

If people genius, if people believe in and like the candidate, maybe the vote for them.

Wow.

Voter support is impacted through campaign choices.

Just just ah, my goodness.

So that's obviously laughable. Yes, this last one is more interesting. Male voters require direct engagement. The gender gap can be narrowed. Deploy male messagers address economic concerns, and don't assume identity politics will hold male voters of color, men hate women, men hate It's not the messenger. It's not the messenger, it's the message. It's not about who the messenger is. It's the message itself. And they can't grasp that.

Why is that their take?

They're doing the same identity politics that is like trying to critique. It's like, no, we need men to talk to male voters. That's the only way. That's also identity politics. You don't understand that. It's not about who's giving the message, it's about what the message actually is. How did white dudes for Harris work out? You literally tried this. You literally tried to do this. It did not work.

Garrison.

Once again, I did block that out of my brain. I did not like hearing it. Yeah, their take is sorry, if you want to talk to the boys, you also have to be a boy.

It's crazy.

What it's lazy, it's stupid. God, all right, what else hit me there? I know that you're saving some of the worst for the end.

Yeah, I am saving some of the bad stuff for last. There's a few other small errors I want to go through, Like, let's do it like it claims that tens of thousands of voters and a handful of states are who sent Trump back to the White House. That's that's accurate. That's just that's just not inaccurate. And the DNC notesic what

You learn very young stranger danger.

And so it's like, if you are someone like me who has cameras at their house and you see a strange person coming to your door, you're not necessarily going to answer that.

No, someone with a clipboard is going to approach me. It's like, Oh, no way, I'm not having not doing it.

I can't. You're I'm already over stimulated. Please leave me on.

But if it's like, oh, hey, it's my neighbor, I'm going to open the door for them and hear them out, that's I fear. That's just common sense. I don't think that was necessarily needed in this report. That's common sense, but it's something I don't disagree with for like the first time. And all these things that you said.

Now, the sort of negative things that the Democrats can learn from, yeah, include what the report calls the leadership voter gap, the fact that the Democratic Party leadership seems increasingly alienated from the priorities of voters and voters may still support their local Democrat on the state level or local races, but maybe we'll vote for Trump because he's offering an alternative to the stagnating corpse of the Democratic Party, even if that alternative turns out to be also terrible

States there there's so many typos, but.

It essentially states that the Trump campaign targeted working class households with populas messaging which distracted from his anti worker record, and working class men, particularly manufacturing and construction, saw Trump as more aligned with their cultural values than Democratic candidates. To Kanezi's down, Democrats need to have a year round presence, more economic messaging, and address cost of living concerns that

Is there anything interesting in those findings?

No, not really, Okay, it's filling the page count. Like the Democrats got a lot of money. The problem isn't the funds. We have the funds. It's that there's small ways that you can use them better. And sure, yeah, but all of this is just treating the symptom, not the problem. The problem wasn't that you were spending more on digital and not enough on broadcast. The problem was the candidate and the message, not differences in ad spending.

It's not that you you had ads running, it's that the ads you had running weren't connecting with the people.

Whose votes you needed, the people that were going to vote for you already, that's who those ads were targeting to, as opposed to bringing in voters who were like, oh man, I'm really not sure.

Trump was pretty bad last time, I'm on the fence here, or just for first time voters.

The first time voter registration was was down significantly.

Yeah, the fact that you ran ads in certain places, that was not the problem. No, you weren't advertising to the people that needed to be advertised too. Your messaging was wrong.

And there's yeah, there's this more core issue that people did not get to actually pick the Democratic nominee, and the Democratic nominee had a lot of issues and direct ties to the many failures of the Biden administration, which brings us to our final section.

Here, I'm afraid.

Based on three polling studies, the campaign pollsters concluded that it was quote important for the vice president to find separation from the status quo. They recognized voters were looking for change and felt it was necessary to find ways to demonstrate how a Harris Wall's administration would be more

Yeah, I mean a trans person did not speak at the twenty twenty four DNC, which was weird and not normal. Trans people have spoken at many DNC conventions in the past, but in the twenty twenty four nope, and trans issues were barely even mentioned, largely absent.

And like, it doesn't need to be a key issue, but the fact that Republicans made it a key issue means that it is worth addressing in some way and affirming that you will actually stand up for the rights of trans people beyond making very kind of vague, confusing statements like Commula made that she'll follow the law, which just does not make sense to anyone. This sort of learned helplessness around like not being able to address these issues.

Is Joe Biden the giant rotting.

Well no, I mean it's in part, yes, But like the genocide in Gaza, like like this, like you know, well documented mass death.

They didn't let a Palestinian person speak at the DNC either they had. They had one panel on it which I attended. It was phenomenal. It was the largest attended panel of the convention. And then they refuse to let a Palestinian person speak.

I mean, and even beyond just letting people speak, it's like there was no real plan to actually stop this from happening. Like you can you can cut off a Israel. You can't do serious things. You can you cannot send them weapons, you can take away weapons. You can do more things. As you've seen, America is not afraid to occupy territories in that region. You could literally invade and

Right, I mean, statistically speaking, at that time, Joe Biden had a very low approval rating. And so you know, Kamala running as the pro Joe candidate doesn't really resonate with voters because they're unhappy.

Yeah, exactly right. And if your message is just more of the same, then it seems pretty easy for your opponents to define what your brand is.

And whenever she tried to say, you know, I'm going to change this, I'm going to change that, they were like, but you're in office now.

Like Harris herself did not actually campaign on like progressive immigration policies, She did not campaign on trends rights, she didn't campaign on identity politics. No, but in absence of a real message, it's all too easy to associate the campaign with the concerns of like liberal elites disconnected from the economic realities of most Americans, and her previous statements on Bidenomics and how she wouldn't have done anything differently

And didn't address anything real.

No, did not address what I would argue were the key issues affecting the campaign, Biden's decision to run again, his age, the lack of a primary, and Israel Palestine.

Yeah, that and honestly, people like to choose their candidate in a democracy.

Really, and this entire thing really.

Is very frustrating because who knows when a nonsense male who will be the candidate again after that?

Yeah, I mean, at this point, I think anyone who can address serious economic as well as these moral issues read like imperialism in the US military, it's going to serve a better chance. Yeah, because that is the situation we have we have found ourselves in.

Yeah, the Democratic National Committee, it's a bummer.

Hello everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. My name is Daniel Kurd. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Tastinian politics, and today I'm joined by doctor Nagarazavi. She is a political anthropologist at the I'm going to get this right Massavar Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University, and her work is on the role of think tanks in shaping US security policies towards.

The Middle East and Iran specifically.

And I've recently had the pleasure of being at a symposium with doctor Rosavi, and I thought she would be a really welcome viewpoint for our audience.

Thank you for joining us, Thanks so much for having me.

So, I think in regards to the war on Iran, there's been such a focus on the straight up her moves and the economic impact of that that conditions on the ground have really slipped from our radars. Like I don't see it as often, and I think I'm a very well plugged in person.

So can we start there.

Can you tell us more about the situation and what it's like for like the average Iranian right now?

Yeah, thank you so much for leading with that, because I do think that is absolutely missing in not only mainstream media but in much of the policy discussions that both of us follow closely. It's very bad on like around for ordinary Iranians on all fronts. Economically, it is very dire at the moment. Inflation is now at unbelievably

People are without a job.

The cost of living again has skyrocketed. People who dependent on the internet somehow to do their work are also now out of a job because it's been the longest internet shut down in Iran's history at this point. So that's the economic aspect that implicates every single person inside iron at the moment. And we're hearing that even people can't exchange the dollar, so things are really really bad at this point. And then you add on the layer

And then you.

Layer onto that a now even more repressive government that has been executing people they accuse of being traders at unbelievable rates, a total clamp down on levels we haven't seen previously. So again, short story, it's very bad inside of Iran right now.

Yeah, I really wanted to make sure that people got that full scope. You know, we forget that there's an internet blackout, We forget that Iranians have already dealt with such a repressive crackdown right before the war started. You know, like I want people to make the connection that like conditions are super super dire. You know, since you did mention that point, maybe we can elaborate a little bit. How do you think the Iranian regime is using this moment?

Yeah, so, you know, in our line of work, it's always hard to make predictions, but we can use past experiences as a somewhat of a guide here. So just to remind your listeners, in January there was a major uprising of Iranians against their government and there was one of the most massive crackdowns since the nineteen eighties when there was massacre against political dissidents, and so going into this.

War, there was already one of the most brutal crackdowns happening.

And then what people who are much more knowledgeable about irans domestic politics are telling me is that the people who are essentially replacing the leaders that were killed by US Israeli strikes are more hardliner and are more aligned with the hard line factions of the IRGC Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is one branch of the military in Iran that is very, very powerful and is loyal to the Supreme Leader, who is now the son of the

Yeah, I also read a really interesting article I'll put in the show notes about the popular mobilization that the Iranian regime has like really fostered over many years to revert ways, whether it's through inserting you know, their forces in universities or through particular kinds of cultural practices around

I shouldn't take responsibility for that at all, but neither of us should. Yeah, neither really it's not.

It's not our fault, but we really have you know, given the worst actors a huge victory.

And also to that point, if you don't mind me jumping.

In, yeah, yeah, of course, it's also you.

Know, triggered nationalism among segments of the population. The war has made.

Many people who were even protesting in January against the government now coming out and defending at least not the sovereignty of their country or the integrity of their country.

I mean, makes sense.

Yeah, So there's all these strange now alliances forming, and the government is actually playing some parts of it smartly, where you'll see them having women without hit job coming to pro government rallies and having a Lebanese woman singer's voice at their rallies, which, for those of you who don't know, women are not allowed to sing as solo artists in Iran.

They can be part of a chorus.

So they're also playing this interesting imaging game where they want to also show, look, we can also be open and inclusive at the same time that they're executing people at the highest rates since the nineteen eighties.

Yeah, I'm going to have to look for that video of the Lebanese singer. So we participated, both.

Of us in a symposium at Princeton I think was titled like the Long Arch of Fascism. Very interesting set of presentations, and your presentation was about the different kind of political strands that facilitated this war underund So I just wanted to just start off with could you outline the argument of your presentation for our listeners.

Yes.

What I argued in the conference, which was fantastic and I really learned so much from your presentation as well, was the idea that this war was made possible in a sense because several different strands of fascism have come together in this moment. And I called it converging fascisms, just to go quickly through it, because I don't want

And there's lots of scholars who have talked about.

How really the anti Muslim project starts with the seventy nine Revolution, this like modern manifestation of it, and so it's always had this anti Shia sentiment to it.

Inflection, Yeah, inflection, thank you.

The second strand that I wanted to highlight was this white supremacy and aryanism, which is interesting because it actually loops in the far right of Iran in actors and Iranian diasporic actors in particular, those that are tied to the former Shah of Iran's son, Riza Pahavi.

Who are really linking they're wanting to overthrow the regime in Iran to restoring this Aryan nation that existed before and this is their word, it's not mine.

The Arab invasion of Islam, and this is really important for the far right movement that supported this invasion was this idea that they're going to save Iran from Islam, which again the Islamophobia, but also the racialized violence against Arabs in the region and particularly against Palestinians. There's this very strong anti Palestinian current in this movement that I'm talking about.

Where they are actively recruiting.

And aligning themselves with Israel in the genocide, which is so horrible. The third strand that I wanted to talk about was settler colonialism and nativism. And I think your listeners probably know enough about this, but this is essentially the bringing together of both the settler colonial violence that we see in Israel, the United States, Australia, et cetera, with the anti immigrant sentiment that has swept across much

I call it that you always need a little bit of pictriarchy, right right, Yeah.

And it's basically like the people who call Trump daddy. You know, this idea that we need some strong man in our lives, and like.

Egyptians have this with CC.

You know this this idea that we just need this strong man to guide us forward is so dominant in a lot of these fascist groups.

Mody is somebody's you know, paternal figure.

And again, Razapadavi, the self proclaimed leader of the Iranian opposition in exile, has numerous times called himself the father of the Iranian people, and he's used really cringe language around how Iran is this abused woman and he's going to come in and save it, and completely out of touch with this amazing feminist movement that came out of Iran organically in twenty twenty two called the woman Like Freedom movement. He's put himself in direct opposition against that movement,

And I say that it's.

Kind of the blending of these at this particular moment that enabled this war.

Yeah, I think the convergence is an apt description. And yet especially the patriarchal stuff, like cringe is the right word, Like it's extremely cringe, but also you know, dangerous that all of these things are coming together to facilitate this kind of violence, and then the war in Iran is facilitating the expansion of fascism here and vice versa. I wanted to just kind of get your opinion of something. I read this article by most of a by Umi in The Guardian about how in the United States what

Yeah, how would you see that?

Yeah, No, I agree to a large extent of it. Biomi is saying, I think anti Palestinian racism is central to how the opposition in Iran views itself. This hasn't been helped by the fact that the Iranian government, the current Iranian government has been at least materially and ideologically one of the biggest supporters of Palestinian liberation and has used the issue as many other dictators in the region have, by the way, has used the issue to actually suppress

So it's its feedback loop. That's pretty horrible.

Yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's good that we outline kind of the different mechanisms there. And it's really you know, it's it's so unfortunate because like you see polling of like Palestinians, and Palestinians were very much against what the Iranian regime did in Syria for example. Yeah, but like you said, there's a weaponization of these these different causes, just like the United States weaponizes the woman life freedom movement.

You know, every regime uses things for its benefit.

Just to add, like a slightly hopeful note is that I actually think the experience of this war has actually made more thoughtful Iranians see more of themselves now in the struggle of Palestinians. Interesting because they are actually seeing the hollowness and hypocrisy of what the US and Israel say and do, and so now I think there's been a little bit of a shift back in the direction of solidarity with the Palestinians.

Oh that's excellent to hear.

You know, we could talk about this all day, Like there's such a disconnect between diasporas and what happens on the ground.

And this is not specific to the Iranians.

But I imagine even if you lean that way, but you're in Iran being bombed by Israel, that's going to change your opinion in a way that like if you're in Los Angeles waving is Reelly flag, it's.

A little bit different. Solutely, there's kind of stakes there.

Yeah, yeah, you're like, who's the one dropping the bombs exactly?

Yeah.

Yeah, that is actually a very hopeful note before I turn into a less hopeful one. So your research is on, as I said earlier, like kind of the think tank landscape in DC. I remember, by the way, finding out about you back in the heydays of Twitter and being like somebody's studying think tanks, Like that's so cool, that's so clever, Like, yes, we should be studying them in

Yeah, so thanks for that setup, because I actually have a book coming out on this and it's called The Geopolitics of Expertise, and that's one of the central findings of the book is that this think tank landscape needs to be understood as a transnational space. That's one of the key findings in which a lot of actors and stakeholders, especially from the Middle East or Swana region, are invested

That's the other key piece of the book.

It's just that this constructed unknowability is key to ensuring that the US maintains a posture of confrontation with Iran. And that means that you want to have this enemy that you can never fully figure out, or this enemy that's always unpredictable, this enemy that.

Never follows the rules.

Because if you had a predictable, rational enemy, you'd eventually have to make some type of peace with them, because that's actually the rational course of action. But when you have weapons manufacturers, when you have foreign governments, when you have all kinds of interests shaping the debate in Washington, you don't actually do what's quote unquote the rational policy for US national security interests as narrowly defined. So sorry if that was too rambly of an explanation of the book.

But no, not at all.

I mean it's interesting because we come at it from different disciplines. You know, I'm a political scientist, and in the international relations landscape, there was you know, well, first and foremost, like American Empire is not really recognized in like American political science, but there was this argument that percolated and like I remember going to grad school and learning this is that, like the United States is hegemonic and we can like study hierarchy, and there have been

A way, exactly.

There's lots of actors implicated or coherent.

Or you right or right or you know, even the Iran war is a clear example, right, there's been winners and losers, as people in DC like to say.

Of this war.

Oil companies are reaping the greatest profits of like the last decade because of this war, because of the shortages coming through the strait of hormones. Weapons manufacturers are doing really well right now. Private equity and AI are doing well. But the damages that we are now seeing coming out of the production side across the Gulf, including inside Iran, is going to have very long term detrimental effects for all of these same industries. Paradoxically, but in the short

Most of it comes out of this one facility in Kutar.

And I was just reading an article about how Tata has lost so many billions of dollars as a result of this war, as a result of the attacks on some of its facilities.

And it's like doh has a ghost town.

And I used to live in Doha, and for anybody who has you know, been there or whatever, I mean, like at its best is a ghost town. Like often it is a ghost town. If it's not like a busy season. So, like, what even does it mean that these places? I can't even fathom what's going to happen long term given the impact of this war.

And that was with just sixty days of war, right, Yeah, so we don't.

Know it's in such a short amount of time. The amount of damage it caused is unbelievable.

Yeah, Like you said, it's good to start to disentangle who's benefiting in service of which actors?

Here are we attacking Iran?

Yeah, and this is like the most corrupt administration imaginable. It really is like kind of breathtaking the level of corruption. So yeah, hopefully, you know, historians and political scientists and political anthropologists will have years and years of research to study this moment. All right, Well, is there anything else you think people should keep an eye on when it comes to the situation in Iran moving forward?

I think we need to be much more critical about who is shaping the narrative on Iran moving forward. A lot of the figures who are now disavowing the war in these thing tanks and saying, you know, war was such a bad idea. Trump fumbled it and this was a terrible idea. Had essentially been i say, hedging.

For this war for a long time, which is that by constructing Iran as this enemy, you can't negotiate with an enemy that.

You can never predict.

You can never negotiate with an enemy that lies about everything. These are the narratives that these Iran experts have been advancing for years, and now we're expected to go and turn back to that same group to get us out of this mess. And that's what I'm going to urge all of the listeners is be much more critical about who is analyzing Iran in such a moment. Look at who they work for, look at what types of analysis they've done in the past, How do they access the Iran,

For example, and New York Times says all kinds of problems, but.

Pick whatever Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, foreign policies, and just do five minutes of due diligence on who that piece is citing as an expert on Iran.

And that's my key takeaway for people.

Yeah, that's such a good takeaway.

I mean, I think there's so many aspects of our politics in which people are trying to convince us the same people who got us into these messes are like all we have like Democratic party operatives that like led us to Trump exactly are the ones like now pretending they really dislike the genocide and Gaza and whatever. And it's the same thing these Iranian experts. They're not even Iranian.

Thank you so much, Danna.

I will put all of the things we talked about in the show notes. Does your book have a publication date yet?

Nobody?

I signed the contract, so oka good good, So people be on the lookout.

It will be with Stanford University Press, so.

Yeah, excellent, excellent, So I will make sure to note that and flag that.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Of course.

Welcome back to Executive dysfunction could happen here?

No?

Is that all right? Garrison? I thought we were. It was pretty close.

There's another like show or column called Executive Dysfunction.

Now, oh is there? Ye sons of bitches? They stole it from us.

That covers like legal issues relating to the Trump administration.

So okay, well that brings us neatly into a first store, or did it?

This is defen here Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening the White House, the crumpling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today, joined by James Stout, Robert Evans, Mia Wong, and Sophie Licktterman. We're a covering the week of May twenty seventh to June third.

Let's talk about intellectual property lawsuits.

Let's right right off the bat. One who is in any capacity using ed or unnoticed It is going to be us against the Viagara people. I'm talking today about Patagonia, the brand suing Fatigonia, the drag queen.

God damn, this is God.

Yeah, I've successfully walked you into my little world. This is a situation very reminiscent of people. Remember the north Face's lawsuit against the South But.

I would argue it's actually kind of different. But okay, I get what you're saying.

The self but lawsuit was funny. If people an't familiar, it's really funny. They were bound to arbitration. They arbitrated the settle, and then the guy turned around and launched the butt face like a few weeks later and they sued him again.

That was a beautiful case of somebody trying to troll a company and also like trolling the concept of like intellectual property laws in like a really creative way, which is which is different from what's happening.

Yeah, Yes, what is happening here is that when Wiley, who dragged persona is Patagonia, right, does a lot of fundraising for outdoors causes, environmental causes, public lands, that kind of thing, has attempted to trademark their use of Patigonia for clothing. Patagonia is suing Wiley to protect its trademark on its logo because some of the logos that Patigonia has used are very obviously like the mirrored Patagonia logos.

Yeah, she's trying to get a trademark for her Patagonia logo, which is just Patagonia instead of Patagonia in the company logo for Patagonia.

Yeah, I'm not sure she tried to tried to trademark, like the it's a Sarah Fitzroy right, like it's about scape or she just tried to trademark Patigonia. It looked like it.

Well I'll double check that right now.

Yeah, because I think what she has offered as a settlement right now is to stop using the logo but continue using the name.

Yeah.

The second is whether Patagonia should be entitled a trademark registration and at least they have a picture in the trademark application of her Patagonia logo.

Yeah.

Yeah, and they've claimed it's usingly similar.

Yeah.

And you made you made a good point when we were talking about this earlier, James, that I hadn't thought of, because you are a better mind than I am in this way, which is that it is because my initial thinking on this was like when I saw that she was trying to trademark, just like her version of the Patagonia logo, was like, well, you just took their logo and put your name on, Like that is fucked up.

Yeah, yeah, there are a couple of things of stake care that people prep ton't understand. One like, I'm in a moral level, not illegal one, folks, but yes, but yeah, morally, I think we should be asking the question is it okay for a company that grossest one point four billion a year to own the rights to a skyline? Like

Yeah, I feel like Patty was kind of poking the bear here. Yeah, one hundred percent, like in a massive way. Really yeah yeah yeah yeah.

No, clearly she knew what she was going for here.

Yeah, and Pagony clearly doesn't want to be fighting this lawsuit.

Where are you seeing this stuff? Is this like a blue Skydews story? Where are you seeing this? No?

This is like a big this is I came into it, like I saw it first on Reddit, but it's also just been pushed into my news feed like I've never heard a five different article. It's it's a big story right now.

Unfortunately I followed her just like generally been aware of her for probably six or seven years, six seven.

The New York Times has a feature that's just on this right now. It's a sizable tale.

Interesting.

I did note that most of her merch has sold out, so the striking effect it's in full force here.

Yeah.

Like, if you wanted to find a way to sell as many Patagonia stick as it look like the Patagonia logo as possible, you would sue her.

This is the way to do it.

Yeah, they're starting her for one dollar plus legal fees. People don't seem to have grasped. That doesn't mean that all that is at stake is a bug here. The fees will be very substantial.

Yes, yeah, although the fees will be substantial. That said, this is clearly a fight Patty wanted to have. Ye, So, like, I am not in a situation where, like I feel particularly angry or disturbed about this lawsuit, like this is something that any company would have done some version of this in response, it's not good that Pedagonia is doing this. It's just what any corporation would do that has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders. And that shouldn't change your

Two percent of its shares are held by its Purpose Trust, which are all the voting shares, and ninety eight percent if it's shares are help by the hold Fast Collective, which is a five oh one C four. So like, I think people see that as like, you know, they'd like to say the Earth is our only shareholder, but like the purpose trust is, as you say, Robert, duty bound to make a profit to give to the C four. This is not the same thing as like activism. It's different.

Yes, and if they I mean literally, if they were not, if they were to not fight what she's doing here like this could cause serious issues for Yeah.

Yeah, I think someone tried to put their logo on a gun or I've heard. I couldn't find reporting on this, but a couple of people have mentioned it to me and obviously they'd suit about that and they got you know, so if they didn't, if they hadn't done this one, they couldn't.

Do that right.

And it's again, this should not I'm not you shouldn't be like, well, patagone isn't the right And but also you shouldn't be like, wow, I completely changed my opinion about this company.

You know.

Yeah, yeah, it's just that they're doing what they do.

Yeah.

I think the underlying structural thing here is something we've talked about on this show at some length, is just the underlying violence of the intellectual property system, like irrespective of this case. This is a kind of silly case of it. But you know, like there are a lot of people in the world who are dead right now because a bunch of a bunch of corporations get to hold like patents on vaccines, for example, Yeah, or insulin.

Yeah, we have some episodes from you. It is good that I made about drug ip and a a greening as well. Yeah, that's a very good point. Mare moving on, we learned this week that the F fifteen E pilot who was shut down over Iran in April had been shot down the week before over Q eight.

What horrible, horrible week. Think you've had a bad week at work.

Versus joining just the list of all timers, like that guy who got nuked at both Roschaman and Nagasaki. There's that guy who had sunk on four consecutive ships.

Is there such thing as a reverse ace? Like if this guy gets shot down three more times like an anti as.

If he gets shut down three more times, he ain't gonna be able to reach the controls of the plane, Like he's already compressed his spine show much.

Yeah, I'm surprised. I didn't think they would let them. I didn't think period after getting shot down and ejecting, you would be allowed to fly a plane at all, Like yeah, quickly, I know.

I was not a lad.

That was my understanding is you're not normally supposed to Like, I don't think this is how normally things would be done, which kind of suggests that there was like they didn't have enough pilots.

Yeah, right, it's kind of remarkable that they were able to get him another at fifteen quickly, I guess. But yeah, yeah, he probably not flying any more planes for a while, I would imagine not Yeah, I mean, who knows, maybe maybe the F fifteen to free I found.

Yeah, it sounds like it's just feeding F fifteen.

He must Yeah, the desert God's demand an F fifteen sacrifice every six days. Marco Rubio in the House has claimed that Afrikaners, we spoke quite this first week right, they're raising the cap to admit Africanas as refugees. Africantisu may admitted and others not because they quote have a high likelihood of assimilation.

We have gauged that there is real interest from a unique subset who would be interested to coming in the United States and who we assess have a high likelihood of rapid assimilation and success in our society, and hence this program was created. Now, that's not a program that's going to exist in perpetuity. It's a program that's designed to the fact that we are seeing the demand. We

Our Afghan allies are refugees. They have been vetted eleven hundred versus this new seventeen thousand.

But it's more than just vetting. We're also trying to determine against the immigration policy the United States. Like everything we do, has to be geared by the national interest, and it is in our national interest if we are allowing people in our country be people that can quickly assimilate into society and be successful.

I can't they assimilate into society. A background been to their centers in my district in Queens they have assimilated and contribute and pay taxes.

Yeah, but we've already assumed a lot of Afghan refugees, as you said, you have them in your district. We've

I think it's really interesting. It's one of the more clear elucidations is the way they see immigration that we've had. Yeah, like you said, it's not about vetting, it's not about background checks. It's specifically about people who can quote unquote assimilate.

I wonder what the economic strata of the Africander is getting getting refugee status are.

I mean it's in terms of the way that Rubio is looking at it. Their economic strata is white, which yeah, well I wonder what I wonder what their actual economic strata is. That is an interesting aspect, Like South Africa is a place where that maps on very very cleanly.

Yeah.

Ways, right, it's That's what I'm saying, like, definitely a lot.

Yeah, and I think just having the means to apply for this.

Yeah.

And that's clearly like Rubio saying, like he's doing this because there is a demand. Let me tell you, there is a demand all over the world, Like I have seen demand to live in the United States in every continent on the planet apart from the ones that are covered in ice. This is as clear as you're going to get to them saying these folks are white, They're coming to America and we're going to lock out the folks who are not. Like I thought, it was very

This is something that like particularly impacts trans people because they're a very shit tone of trans people on Medicaide and a lot of those people are also disabled and that's just been an absolute nightmare for them. If you are in a position where you can hire someone for I think the work, what's the word is like thirty hours a week? I think is the requirement?

Eighty hours a month? Is eight hours twenty ish a week.

Yeah, Like, if you're in a position to just hire someone for that, you should do it because that's the difference between these people like having food and not having food.

Yeah, this is a potential and this will kill people. Yeah, like just just the fuck ups in the bureaucracy. Even if people are able to find the work of volunteer or study or whatever. Yeah, but the delay so that will cause will kill people.

This is also a thing, by the way, that some unions have historically done with WW has done this, which is like getting people positions to be able to do volunteering. And if that's the thing you can do, you should do this because this is a unfathomable humanitarian crisis for a bunch of the most vulnerable people in the US. And yeah, it's real bad.

Yeah it's not good to all. I think that is a good point mere that, Like, if you're in a place to help people coordinate their volunteering and document that, like, that's a good thing to start thinking about. Garrison, you got any small things?

A few more small things. Trump signed an executive order to expand AI cybersecurity capabilities and protections, and last Friday, Chelsey Gabbard resigned as Director of National Intelligence citing her husband's recent cancer diagnosis. Trump has elect and Bill Poulti, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to serve as acting Director of National Intelligence. Pulte is a Trump loyalist with no intelligence background, and even Republican senators don't seem

Let's catch up with the war in Iran. It ran this week hit a commercial vessel with an anti ship cruise missile in the Persian Gulf, as well as firing at US facilities and hitting the international airport in Qit. But they've killed at least one person there. This comes as talks are continuing to fail to reach a resolution, at least in part because Israel refuses to stop attacking Lebanon and committing war crimes. Axios is reporting that Trump said,

Let's go on a break and then we can talk about the California elections and the Supreme Court. Okay, elections in California. Why is California like that? What is going on over there?

It's because I left. It's my fault.

Yeah, grieving Sophie.

That was the last thing holding it together there.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Let's start with the La mayoral race.

I want to talk about it. It's my duty to talk about this. I would like to talk a bit about Spencer Pratt.

Who may may be advancing, who.

May be advancing, That's what I'm saying.

At time of recording, which is Wednesday, June third, at around three thirty pm Pacific time, Pratt is currently in second place with thirty percent of the votes. Bass is at thirty five percent and has already been guaranteed to move forward, and I THEE Raman is in third with twenty two percent. And like I said, there's sixty percent of the votes counted. So why the fuck is Spencer Pratt a former reality TV cast member. I'm not even

Here are some highlights listeners.

We apologize for what Sophie's about to make you experience.

This is a lot of audio, Sophie, we need all of it.

Oh god, it Garrison, just copyright.

We'll just do it.

Just do it for me. That was the best.

Like, I was proud of myself for not doing what I wanted to do to you, because what I wanted to do and say to you, dear, I didn't because I was praying, praying like I do every day, to not say the things that I want to say to you, to your mom. I know I'm not. Do you see how I'm not saying them? Yeah, I'm very proud of myself.

Take your heads about to explode.

So I am sorry if I disrespected you. But I'm very emotional these days, very very so I say things that I feel.

I was the one that wanted to kill anybody that would ever talk like that about.

My sister, and I still would.

But that goes through my mom too, and as a family, that's how we all should be.

Well, I didn't say anything negative aout your mom. Your mom is just the vagina that made Heidi come on to earth. Your mom is not Jesus or God or the Creator. So why can't I say that?

So why can't I say that?

Why can't I say that?

No, it's not it's my opinion, preacher, preacher, this isn't Bible study, this is no one's preaching, No one's preaching, No one is preaching here. You're not her sister.

You're not her friend. Liar, walk away from.

These lives because she's gonna sit here and keep eying you. You're the biggest poser in this town. You know what you're going to burn.

I go back to the real estate job.

Liar.

Yeah, that was Spencer talking to his sister in law about his mother in law.

All this is fake, this is all acting like this, this is I don't know this. This doesn't move me at all.

Half of this is acting. Half of this is not acting.

Yeah, yes, that is he here, he is talking to his own sister.

Godkay, no, we've already cathlog this ship.

I'm gonna leave.

But I didn't get to say, Hi, are you guys good? How are you.

Excellent?

How are you.

When?

When?

When?

What are you crying about?

Seventy? Are you crying about that? That's why you're not in my life, you crazy bitch, because you come to barbecues and just start crying. I was just enjoying myself and my wife, and I get crying sisters in front of me.

She just wanted to say, but that gets a crying away.

What the do I need to do to you? Drama?

He didn't just ignoring me at the party. Mar What just happened?

We were having a little conversation and then all of a sudden, I got people storming out of here.

I'm talking now. You know it's your brother, but she's off his rocker.

I don't know what's talking with her.

You know what, I'm talking about, my little sister who's not relevant to my life.

Oh god?

Oh you know? Okay?

Oh, and just to say, just to say, she has told people not to vote for her brother in modern times.

Just a shacking, shocking stuff.

Yeah, he seems like he's an even tempered guy.

Yeah, one less clip, just because I'll I never want to talk about him again.

So I'm going to get all that.

I am the managing executive producer of this podcast. Let me have this.

Thank you.

You're on this club, dude, relaxed, bro, Look at hell's.

Wrong with me?

I hate that pitch.

Excuse my French.

Hey, you're crazy.

You're looking me in a weirdo.

Bro.

They just yelled at me very knowledge. I'm so loud as somebody's yelled in my face for three years.

I'm over you.

I don't want to hear anything together.

Tell me y'all in my day.

Son walked away from me before we have a problem.

Walk them away.

God, you bo don't know how nazor science.

Like I just really outed, like oh myself smashing his head off, you know, like.

My pieces, Like.

All right, so this is so this is like if like Clovicular run, like ran for office in like ten years yeah right, twenty years.

Yeah yeah, And you know it's a reality TV show. You're right, there's parts of it that are scripted. There's parts of it that are enhanced, there's parts of it, but you can't you can't fake that fucking vein popping out of his head.

A lot of it scripted, but you don't get passed, so to speak, to be that kind of character if you're not already a giant asshole, right, I.

Mean yeah, it's in some ways less explicitly scripted than like WWE, but you you fall into certain roles because that's what you are getting paid to, Like that is your job is contingent on performing this kind of real not real thing. And I honestly, you know, like the sort of like like iol streamer thing is is a

Yeah, well I want to talk a little bit about his campaign style. He shared this video on X the Everything app, and it got millions and millions of views, with people saying it's the best campaign video of all time, and so we're gonna play it for you now.

No, it's more of him than I've ever seen.

This is the Batman one.

I haven't seen this.

She was there.

He did not make this video.

He did not make this. He shared it and he he's big on the AI sharing video trend.

Yes, his website is filled with it.

Yeah, there have been a lot of AI videos in LA races time.

There's been a lot of these LA election like Batman videos. Yes, yes, let's I guess. Let's watch this one.

Sure until we get bored with it.

Yeah, wait, hang on, just break that down.

Yeah, I think this makes sense to watch a little bit.

Yeah. Yeah, we have to explain first. We start with the entire Hollywood sign of flame.

You see is these these goons dressed in all black tactical gear with the white that says DSA, which is.

One of the best things I've ever seen. That one of my favorite part about this game.

Yes, the paramilitary DSA forces in Los.

Angeles, and then it goes into this sort of dark Knight rises like courtroom.

Yeah, Karen Bass in the.

Middle, except Karen Bass has joker makeup and.

Kamala Harris is I think drinking alcohol on one side and that's now.

Oh yeah, she's just like straight from the bottle too. Is that all say too?

I think there's a little bit of district fucking Hunger Games, the Hunger Games, the Hunger Games Capital in that design too, anyway.

Yeah, and uh, Gavin Newsom's and likes, you know, like yeah, a wrist acratic garb.

Yeah, okay, that's Gavin.

Okay, please, I'm begging you.

There's homeless drug addicts in front of the schools.

My children aren't safe.

Look, if you were a transgender migrant, I could get you a free pussy all right.

Wow, Wow, I know, holy shit, holy shit, I'm fascinated by what we've got amazing.

James, have you not seen this before?

Absolutely not.

No, I haven't seen this either.

I shared this video in our work chat like like a month and a half, like.

Yeah, oh wait, no, shit, I have seen it.

Oh god, I didn't watch.

I've got to control my exposure to this shit. It's made me very angry. So we now have a marionette off like a Latina.

Okay, god, yeah that makes sense.

But there's like, d you say people? Do you say? Thugs and tact ol Gary, Plus they.

Throw the woman on the ground who's complaining about Yeah that the homeless drug addicts. I think we're good.

It's it's it's all that kind of stuff. It's yeah, whatever.

There's like a fake Batman scene. They asked for Spencer Spencer and a fake Batman costume. Blah blah blah.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, Spencer prattis Batman. That's that's Spencer Pratt's Batman.

Yes, you know, that's the kind of stuff they's sharing.

And you know, one of the biggest things he's run on is that his house was burned down and he was didn't have a place to live, and he claimed that he was living in a trailer on the property where his house used to be. And then it turned out that he was actually not staying in that trailer, but he was staying at the hotel bel Air, which is one of the nicest hotels in Los Angeles.

Yeah, oh yeah.

And in response to to that, he made this video.

Now, this is a story all about how my life got certain upside down.

The prince of itself called bel Air.

Wow.

Oh god, oh, I don't know. I don't want to get me no, no, no, millions.

Of views, millions of views.

Yeah, and this like weird.

Rogue, no qualification political candidate thing is working. People are like, we need to change and I'm prott the BBC. In terms of fundraising during the race, Pratt has blown away the other two. He raised two point seven million dollars between April nineteenth and May sixteenth. That's nearly ten times what Bass, a longtime politician, raised in the same period, and approximately seven times what Nathio Raman raised.

I mean, no one likes Bass, right, it's the other thing, Right, the Democrats have doubled down on doing exactly the same shit they've been doing for decades across California.

Yeah, it's this like feckless moderate liberalism.

Yeah, like cost oral libs will be how I describe the Democrats.

Yeah, and just to say, like Nithia Rahm did enter the race late and she is far far left from Karen, So we're seeing that. But the thing that's really interesting to me about this is there's nine point six nine million people in La County, and you know, I'm comparing it to what I think will probably be about what it'll be for.

Twenty twenty six.

But in twenty twenty two, you know, Karen Bass got two hundred and seventy eight thousand votes, Rick Caruso only got two hundred and thirty two thousand votes, and Kevin dalone only got fifty thousand votes out of nine point six nine million people. That's the amount of people that actually voted in the primary in twenty twenty two. It's and it's looking to be very similar for twenty twenty six.

Yeah, maybe even a little bit lower.

I mean, I agree, I think it might be a little bit lower.